Re: Aw: Re: [gentoo-user] upgrading (profiles, too)

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 6:02 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> Given that is going to involve quite a bit of changes, and it appears
> the OP has a outdated system, going in steps may be a good idea.  At
> least that way if something breaks, it may be easier to fix since the
> steps are smaller.
>

++

I would never attempt a profile change unless I had a system running
on a repo that was completely up to date, with no pending updates.
That is, if you run emerge --sync and emerge -uD world nothing happens
(well, aside from the random one package that just happened to
change).

If you try to do the migration on a tree that is many months old with
old system packages on it, there is no guarantee that all the critical
packages on your system support the new profile.  We ensure all that
stuff gets fixed before we tell people to change profiles, but if
you're running a system that predates all the fixes then you're going
to run into all the old bugs that were already fixed.

The profile change isn't super-urgent. First get all the /etc/portage
cruft fixed, then get the system to cleanly update.  Then sync to a
new repo and run updates again.  Once you have a completely fresh
system the profile update should be fine, though this change is more
impactful than most.

The 17.0 update is much lower risk, and that is many months old, so
there is much less risk of running into issues.  Even so I wouldn't do
it with pending updates on the system.

Really the guiding principle here is to not accumulate technical debt.
When you don't sync very regularly you're accumulating technical debt.
When you leave unmerged config files lying around you're accumulating
technical debt.  When you don't update profiles, you get the
picture...

Any one of these issues on their own might not cause immediate
problems, but as you accumulate these issues you can find yourself
suddenly hitting a wall at full speed and just getting error after
error and having no idea which of your 47 accumulated issues is
causing which of the 150 lines of portage error output.  Then you're
stuck just going through and trying to clean everything up with half
the system not working.

If you deal with issues as they come up so that at any time only one
thing at a time is changing, then you're less likely to get hit with
an update where the system wants to update 500 packages at one time
and it is impossible to deal with all the issues that come up as a
result.  You can even run into upstream issues when you update
infrequently as they might not support doing 3 upgrades at one time
and nobody at Gentoo will have tested this...

-- 
Rich