Re: [gentoo-user] Heads Up - switching to profile 17.1 is not as easy as it sounds

[Davyd McColl]

On Tue, 11 Jun 2019 at 14:23, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 7:21 AM Davyd McColl <davydm@×××××.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 11 Jun 2019 at 12:34, Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@××××××.be>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> I had some trouble switching to the new profile 17.1.
> >> Following the advice in the news item didn't suffice.
> >>
> >
> > first off, `emerge -v1 /lib /lib32` didn't work out because I had an old
> library in there I
> > had to remove with `emerge --depclean` first. I also have an old install
> of sickbeard, which
> > I had to remove from world for the same reason: `emerge -v1 /lib /lib32`
> would just complain
> > about not being able to find an installable source (my words -- can't
> remember the original
> > terms), but it didn't really look like an error -- all green text.
>
> I've updated two hosts.  One went very smoothly, but it is a fairly
> dedicated host.  One had a few issues, and it has a LOT of history.
>
> I found that anything 32-bit tended to cause more trouble, and I had a
> few orphans as well.  It wasn't a huge deal.
>
> I think a big part of that is that before I did ANYTHING I took a lot
> of steps to clean up.  I ran depclean and revdep-rebuild as a start.
> I reviewed all the migration tool output and anything that looked
> non-essential was depcleaned.  When I did the 32-bit rebuild anything
> that was giving me trouble was traced back to whatever pulled it in
> and depcleaned (I forget if I did that up-front or if I just deleted
> the offending library and depcleaned the rev dep later - obviously
> don't do that for anything you care about).
>
> On a more dedicated host/container/etc I suspect you won't have many
> issues, because you're not going to have a huge pile of legacy stuff
> lying around with complicated dependency relationships.
>
> Some of my rebuild and depclean issues were resolved with --backtrack
> and --with-bdeps=y.
>
> In general a good principle is that anytime you want to change
> profiles take some time to do some housekeeping.  The less junk you
> have on your system, the less there is that can go wrong.
>
> On my one host I also took the opportunity to decide whether I REALLY
> needed wine.  That is a TON of 32-bit stuff you otherwise probably
> don't need.  After removing it you need to clean out package.use
> because we don't have soft USE dependencies yet.
>
> And of course before I did anything I took a zfs snapshot of my root
> filesystem which only contains the OS for the most part.  So, if I ran
> into serious issues a rollback would probably have been a one-liner
> (I'm guessing that I'd do that from a rescue disk just to keep daemons
> with stuff in /var from going nuts).
>
> Overall it went better than I was anticipating actually.  We haven't
> had a migration like this one in a while, but I do think that the
> risk-level of this one was a bit undersold.  Restructuring all your
> libraries is obviously a risky task and while you shouldn't be
> alarmist it is something that has a lot of potential to go wrong.  To
> be fair, the news item does say that you should do a backup.
>

I guess YMMV. I regularly:
- emerge --sync
- emerge --update --newuser --deep @world @preserved-rebuild -a
- emerge --depclean -a
(by regularly, I mean at least twice a week). If I uninstall anything, I
clean out
package.{use|accept_keywords|licence} where appropriate. AFAIK I followed
the news item pedantically, following it step-by-step until I got to
re-merging /lib32
& /usr/lib32, when things came a little unstuck.

Doesn't mean I'm couldn't miss something, just that I'm not leaving this
machine out-of-date for months at a time or expecting miracles. I also had
to ditch `wine-any` (for now, at least). I _do_, however, have abi_x86_32
set
on for */*, which speaks to your point about "mo' 32-bit, mo' problems". I
run
Steam, so I expect to find enough 32-bit dependencies that if I know that a
requirement for libfoo _always_ includes the 32-bit artifact, I might have
an
easier time with some game I got on Humble Bundle. I also do use a small
number of overlays, but try to keep that to a minimum as common sense tells
me that many overlays is a quick way to get into trouble. I'll only use an
overlay
if I _really_ want/need something (like dotnet core).

I appreciate all the help and experience available from this list
and would appreciate any input on my updating procedures above,
in particular, anything which would have made this transition smoother.

Mostly, I find portage to be very capable, though it's taken me quite a
while
to make heads-or-tails of the error output, but I'm getting better at it.
Coming
from Debian or a derivative for around 16 years, I truly appreciate Gentoo
and
the freedom it provides, not to mention the community and help that I've
received.

-d


> --
> Rich
>
>

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