Re: [gentoo-user] How do you make a gentoo system confirm to a release?

[Bo Ørsted Andresen]

On Tuesday 19 December 2006 11:38, Christian Nygaard wrote:
> If you have a Gentoo system with a specific release point for e.g.
> 2006.0and you would like to live upgrade it so it confirms to a 2006.1
> profile is that possible?

You just change the profile. The differences in the profiles between releases 
or very minor.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml

> To be specific I would like if possible to have a live upgrade to stage3
> but with using i586 compile instead of i686. I could rm -rf /var/db and then
> reemerge world, is there a better way of doing it?

It's quite unclear to be what you think you would achieve by removing the vdb 
(/var/db/pkg - database of installed packages with information about which 
files belongs to which package...).

What you would achieve though is a system where portage thinks nothing is 
installed and hence you would have to be quite lucky to avoid orphans after 
the reinstalling everything in the world file (which happens to be outside 
the vdb). Seems pretty pointless to me..

Did you just want an upgraded system? In that case all you needed was:

# emerge -uvDa world

Or if you wanted to recompile everything you would just need 
emerge --emptytree...

The vdb is the single most important part of any Gentoo system meaning that if 
it gets removed you have to reinstall (at least to avoid orphans). The 
portage database (the tree), distfiles and pkgdir on the other hand can be 
easily regenerated. Even the world file can be regenerated if emerge.log is 
intact...

> I did get a block when doing an emerge world and the system
> is not a production one so some violence can be used.
[SNIP]

Mostly blockers are instated because you need to remove a package (namely the 
blocker) before an upgrade can take place. Tell us what the blocker is if 
you're unsure about what to unmerge...

-- 
Bo Andresen