Re: [gentoo-user] What is the best way forward? - Update 2 - SUCCESS! - CURRENT!!!

[Grant Taylor]

On 3/8/21 3:29 PM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> With hindsight, removing firefox, thunderbird and libreoffice and
> replacing them with their -bin counterparts at the start of the
> process would have saved much time. You could switch back to the
> source options once the system is up to date.

You're probably correct.

However I don't think I would do that even if I had known / thought 
about doing so.  Partially because changing things was questionable at / 
near the start and partially because this was about possibility, not 
efficiency.

> How did you manage gcc upgrades, did you run gcc-config manually
> whenever gcc was updated?

Is "I ignored them and let emerge deal with it" count?  I did see gcc 
upgrades along the way.

I don't remember what it was at the start, probably 8.<something> or 
9.<something>.  I did see 9.3 somewhere along the way.  gcc -v says that 
10.2.0 is currently installed.

> Do you feel it was worth the effort of updating for every day of the
> git history?

I don't know if it was worth the effort or not.  I initially did one day 
at a time while testing the waters and going from theory to some 
practical experience of the method.

Very quickly I used a different version of e (1 or 2) that took the date 
as a parameter.  My command line was calling e with the date derived 
from the d variable and then decrementing the d variable after the e 
function finished.  I.e.

    e $(date +%Y-%m-%d -d "$d days ago"); $((d=$d-1))

I would let that run, deal with any results, then hit the up arrow and 
enter.

I just let that process continue for a while.  Then at some point I 
optimized it into e3 and ran that for a while.  Then I optimized that 
into the while e3; do true; done loop.

But I stuck with single day steps mostly from inertia.  It was working. 
So ... stick with it.

> Would a larger increment have saved time, or did you think minimising
> the number of issues to deal with after each emerge was more important?

Maybe.  If anything, it would have saved the time for emerge to process 
all of it's meta data.  Much like an initial emerge vs an emerge 
--resume.  But again, this was about the viability of the process, not 
the efficiency thereof.

I probably could have gone with a week at a time.  I don't know if that 
would have helped or not.  I don't think I would go with more than a 
week with a largely automated process.

I think one month increments probably would be pushing the envelope.  I 
feel like some of the Python changes were 2 or maybe 3 months apart.  So 
with two combined with how you landed, you might cross Python 3.6 w/o 
3.7, to both 3.6 and 3.7, to w/o 3.6 and w/ 3.7 barrier.  That probably 
wouldn't be pretty.

> Anyway, glad it worked for you - it's more or less how I would have
> approached it but never had to, so thanks for doing the legwork :)

You're welcome.

Hence the DenverCoder9 comment, for people searching ~> reading the 
mailing list archive in the future.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die