Re: [gentoo-user] Any big gotcha's when update from several (5) mnths

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:40:32 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote:
>
>> If fetch-only is done unattended, and there's a really slow mirror,
>> the interactive emerge later will still be fast, where if using
>> parallel-fetch and you hit a slow download, you just have to wait, or
>> bring up the fetch log in another terminal and kill the wget session
>> etc.
>
> Yes, which is one of the reasons I do a fetch-only immediately after a
> sync - unattended. But when working interactively, running emerge world
> three times, once each for download, pretend and install, only slows
> things down. Not just the downloads but also the fact that the dependency
> tree has to be calculated three times.

I think you have a specific view that is likely the very best thing to
do for your situation, what ever that is, be it work, office, server
farm. I don't know. I'm guessing however, that in your world machines
are always turned on, burning power, and running cron jobs in those
environment makes lots of sense.

In my world, which is just a lowly home user of Linux for nearly 15
years now, many of the machines I take care of spend more time turned
off than on. cron jobs don't work when there's no power applied, and
while you can let the machine immediately catch up when the machine is
powered back up, in my world of futures trading I need to control CPU
and network usage to ensure that both downloads and builds don't
impact my opportunity to make a trade and hopefully make some money.
As I write this email I'm currently in my 23rd S&P futures trade of
the day which at this point is just about 5 hours old. Some of these
trades take only a few minutes and likely wouldn't execute correctly
if portage was building KDE.

Like Paul, I run fetch unattended, sometimes 4 or 5 times over
multiple days before running emerge -DuN @world. I don't care at all
that the tree is calculated multiple times, and I don't care if I
download multiple revisions of the same package but only build the
last one. When I do sit down to start the build everything is ready
and I can be more assured that the build will completely finish and
not leave the machine in some funny state. Additionally, it gives me
time to watch this list for problems others are having, if any, before
I end up having the same problems.

It's a different world we live in I think, and different worlds
potentially come up with different best practices. The 23rd trade just
completed. The computer is now off looking for the 24th.

- Mark