Re: [gentoo-user] Telling emerge to continue when something goes wrong

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

On Sunday 14 January 2007 13:22, Iván Pérez Domínguez 
<ivanperezdominguez@×××××.com> wrote about '[gentoo-user] Telling emerge 
to continue when something goes wrong':
> After installing Gentoo in different machines several times, I wonder if
> is there any way to tell emerge to keep installing as much as possible
> even when something goes wrong.

No, there's not.  But, there is a way to emerge to restart either from the 
package where it errored out (emerge --resume), or on the next package 
(emerge --resume --skipfirst).

Since emerge is a somewhat well-behaved program, it if fails it will exit 
with a non-zero exit code.  With that knowledge in hand it's easy to have 
your shell restart things.  The following (all one line) should work in 
any POSIX-compliant shell:

emerge --some-options a-bunch/of-packages || while ! 
emerge --resume --skipfirst; do :; done

I've also attached a longer system update script that I use, for reference.

In general, it's best for a program to bail out if it discovers it can't do 
everything you asked, and not do it "half-way".  The only program that 
even provides a "keep going" option is make, and all the uses I've seen of 
that option are abuses.

-- 
"If there's one thing we've established over the years,
it's that the vast majority of our users don't have the slightest
clue what's best for them in terms of package stability."
-- Gentoo Developer Ciaran McCreesh