Re: [gentoo-user] Bisect a problem going back months?

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Paul Hartman
>> <paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>>>> I'm wondering if there is a Gentoo way to bisect a bug that's crept
>>>> into my 64-bit Intel-based system (Intel process, motherboard and
>>>> graphics) over the last few months. Fundamentally when this bug
>>>> appears it generates a complete X crash back to the gdm login. My
>>>> suspicion is that it's related to the Gentoo push to use firefox-bin
>>>> and 32-bit Flash until some security issues were addressed but I don't
>>>> know that for sure.
>>>>
>>>> Are there specific overlays I'd want to add using layman that would
>>>> allow me to get back to earlier versions of the Intel graphics driver,
>>>> 64-bit Firefox and the now masked versions of Flash I was using say
>>>> 2-3 months ago? At this point I don't know for sure that what I need
>>>> isn't in portage and just masked. I'll start reviewing that this
>>>> evening. This post was primarily just to figure out what my options
>>>> might be.
>>>>
>>>> I've never used sunrise or sunset, etc. Maybe it's as easy as adding
>>>> one of those to layman and then bisecting my way through some
>>>> experiments to figure out where the problem first appeared?
>>>
>>> You can get old ebuilds from http://sources.gentoo.org, and maybe take
>>> whole portage tree snapshot from a given point in time (never tried
>>> it). Or maybe there are portage webrsync snapshots going back (again,
>>> never used them).
>>>
>>> If you have demerge installed it should have taken snapshots of which
>>> packages you had installed at each time you ran emerge as well. I
>>> think that'll still depend on those old versions still being in the
>>> tree, which for security fixes etc they usually are not kept, but all
>>> should be on http://sources.gentoo.org
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Paul. This is something to look at.
>>
>> It seems at first glance it's roughly equivalent to what's on my
>> system right now. For instance concerning adobe-flash I see only one
>> small difference - the oldest 9.0.159 version differs shows up in eix
>> on the machine but isn't at sources.gentoo.org. That's not bad.
>>
>> I believe you are right that I could probably somehow figure out by
>> hand using /var/log/emerge.log what was installed after a certain
>> date, or possibly figure out what version was running at a certain
>> date. I wonder if there are any tools for figuring out the installed
>> versions back in time. I don't save anything other than emerge.log and
>> I don't know for sure than an old rev of that file was thrown away at
>> some point and the file started over again. I suspect many ebuilds
>> that I've used are no longer in sources.gentoo.org as almost certainly
>> I used Flash 4.0, Flash 5.0, etc. sometime along time ago.
>>
>> Thanks for the pointer.
>
> Everything should be in sources.gentoo.org going back more than 10
> years. The trick is that you need to click the "Show dead files" link
> to see the versions that have been removed from the tree. For example
> this link shoes many adobe-flash revisions including 9.0.159:
>
> http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/www-plugins/adobe-flash/?hideattic=0
>
> Sorry I didn't mention that in my first message. :)
>
>

Ah, very cool, and don't worry about not mentioning it. I should have
seen it myself.

So basically then anything that's there I could add to some sort of
personal overlay (docs are out there somewhere I'm sure) and then I
could continue to use this stuff into the future if necessary.

Thanks!

- Mark