On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Paul Hartman <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: >> I'm wondering if there is a Gentoo way to bisect a bug that's crept >> into my 64-bit Intel-based system (Intel process, motherboard and >> graphics) over the last few months. Fundamentally when this bug >> appears it generates a complete X crash back to the gdm login. My >> suspicion is that it's related to the Gentoo push to use firefox-bin >> and 32-bit Flash until some security issues were addressed but I don't >> know that for sure. >> >> Are there specific overlays I'd want to add using layman that would >> allow me to get back to earlier versions of the Intel graphics driver, >> 64-bit Firefox and the now masked versions of Flash I was using say >> 2-3 months ago? At this point I don't know for sure that what I need >> isn't in portage and just masked. I'll start reviewing that this >> evening. This post was primarily just to figure out what my options >> might be. >> >> I've never used sunrise or sunset, etc. Maybe it's as easy as adding >> one of those to layman and then bisecting my way through some >> experiments to figure out where the problem first appeared? > > You can get old ebuilds from http://sources.gentoo.org, and maybe take > whole portage tree snapshot from a given point in time (never tried > it). Or maybe there are portage webrsync snapshots going back (again, > never used them). > > If you have demerge installed it should have taken snapshots of which > packages you had installed at each time you ran emerge as well. I > think that'll still depend on those old versions still being in the > tree, which for security fixes etc they usually are not kept, but all > should be on http://sources.gentoo.org >
Thanks Paul. This is something to look at. It seems at first glance it's roughly equivalent to what's on my system right now. For instance concerning adobe-flash I see only one small difference - the oldest 9.0.159 version differs shows up in eix on the machine but isn't at sources.gentoo.org. That's not bad. I believe you are right that I could probably somehow figure out by hand using /var/log/emerge.log what was installed after a certain date, or possibly figure out what version was running at a certain date. I wonder if there are any tools for figuring out the installed versions back in time. I don't save anything other than emerge.log and I don't know for sure than an old rev of that file was thrown away at some point and the file started over again. I suspect many ebuilds that I've used are no longer in sources.gentoo.org as almost certainly I used Flash 4.0, Flash 5.0, etc. sometime along time ago. Thanks for the pointer. Cheers, Mark What about really old
