Re: [gentoo-user] Would emerge --sync remove old profiles?

[Stroller]

On 26 Apr 2008, at 19:57, Mark Knecht wrote:
> ...
> I don't buy that it's my issue created by a long time between updates.
> I could turn on any machine that's sitting in a junk heap or back room
> somewhere. It hasn't been powered up in a long time. I log in and want
> to figure out what's in front of me with respect to updates. I type
> emerge sync and portage deletes files. to me that's just wrong.
>
> As I say, I can get around the problem by simply copying absolutely
> everything somewhere else to protect it. It just seems to me that's
> not as slick as Gentoo really is. (And I think you know I LOVE this
> distribution and have no desire to run anything else ...

To be completely fair, one has to compare this with the situation in  
which one digs out of the storeroom an old PC on which a binary  
distro has been installed. I have read Ubuntu users complaining that  
the easiest thing to do is backup /home and appropriate /etc files  
and then reinstall from scratch.

I would say that you can probably get a better result with Gentoo, if  
you do backup /usr/portage as you suggest. The chances are that your  
old machine is not using the latest profile in its Portage tree - if  
you can update to that, and then this is shown as depreciated (but  
still existent) in the current tree then I think you maybe have a  
fighting chance.

I guess what would be ideal for you is if a frozen snapshot of the  
Portage tree was archived every 6 months or so. You could probably  
then update sanely from snapshot to the next. But I think you're  
probably a "corner case" in wishing this, and I think it'd be  
rejected, were it requested of the Gentoo developers. The good news,  
of course, is that _anyone_ can make their own Portage snapshot  
tarballs as frequently as they like, automating it with cron.

Stroller.
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