On 3/15/26 1:50 PM, Dave Sizer wrote:
On Sat, 14 Mar 2026, Dale wrote:
Howdy,
As some know, on my old and new rig, I compile my updates in a chroot
environment. Then I copy the binaries over and use the -k option on my
running OS. That way I don't have a crash when one program is updated
and another it depends on is not yet updated.
[...]
I was surprised to read this... is such a process really necessary when
emerging package updates?
I am pretty new to gentoo, but I assumed that this was something that
portage handled somehow already, although I admittedly didn't really
look into the details of how.
- Dave
The reason I started doing that was mostly because of KDE. When KDE
does a large update, several packages when I'm using them won't work
correctly if one package is newer than another. I've had file managers
for example crash and it won't open again until the other package is
updated as well. I've even had text editors crash and refuse to open
until the packages it needs are also updated. Given that some packages,
qtwebengine for example, can take several hours to compile, I just made
a copy of my OS and do my updates there. Even if it takes 6 or 8 hours
for a update, it doesn't affect my running OS at all. Then when done, I
copy the binaries over and emerge those, no compiling for those. This
way my updates are only going to be out of sync version wise for maybe
20 to 30 minutes or even less in a lot of cases. Usually when I start
emerging the binaries, I start closing programs so that I can logout and
back in anyway. It takes me a few minutes to close certain things and
make notes of something I need to get back to when I log back in.
I've also noticed that Firefox has a new way of handling this. If you
update Firefox while it is running already and try to open a new tab, it
will pop up and tell you that you must restart first. Once you restart,
then it works. At least it doesn't crash or something tho.
Even tho my new rig is a lot faster, it still takes a long time to do
some updates. While qtwebengine is one, libreoffice is another. Even
Firefox takes a while to compile. Doing it this way just keeps me from
having problems that I can easily avoid. That said, I do run a lot of
programs here.
Hope that helps with the why.
Dale
:-) :-)
