Re: [gentoo-user] emerge on really old tree

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 00:49 on Tuesday 01 February 2011, Mick did 
opine thusly:


> > It is so much easier to just backup your data files and re-install, then
> > restore the data. It'll take a few hours, trying to upgrade might take
> > days.
> >
> > If you want to try, start with "emerge -avuND system", get that to
> > complete and take it from there.
>
> Only to reinforce what Alan says.  Sometimes even a month or two is enough
> to cause headaches if cornerstone packages of the toolchain have been
> updated more than once.
>
> Unless you want to undertake this for self-punishment purposes, it will be
> much easier to back up /home /etc and /var/lib/portage/world from the
> current system and reinstall using the last two directories to minimise
> manual configuration of your box.

:-)

I thought of some more logic.

A box running python-2.4.x will likely need most of it's packages updated 
anyway, probably at least 90% given the high rate of ebuild churn in portage.

So one can spent many fruitless hours navigating through all the blockers 
figuring out in what order that 90%+ must be built. With very high odds that 
some emerges will fail needing manual intervention.

Or rather just start over and let portage figure it out reliably as there will 
be no blockers. With very high odds that no emerges will fail, resulting in no 
manual intervention.

I've also found that masochistically trying to figure out it all out (yes I 
have tried it...) taught me nothing. Eventually I would just:

emerge -C <gigantic list of everything mentioned in blocker output>
emerge -av <gigantic list of everything mentioned in blocker output>

So it's not even a learning opportunity. But upgrading to KDE-4.6.0 from 4.5.x 
when I had kbluetooth installed - now *that* was an excellent learning 
opportunity.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com