On 3/15/26 3:14 PM, Wol wrote:
On 15/03/2026 18:50, 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.
Portage has improved a lot of late. But there are probably still some
rough edges. I had a minor nightmare a month or so ago updating my
laptop. I'm expecting a major nightmare when I try to update my
desktop once I fix it.
Gentoo is a rolling release from source, so things can go wrong. And
if you leave too long a gap between updates, they usually do. But you
should always be able to recover.
Cheers,
Wol
This is true and the problem I had wasn't really emerge. It is just the
way some packages work. I open one program but it depends on two or
three others and they need to match version wise sometimes. When they
don't match, that can cause a crash or some other weird thing to
happen. After I ran into this problem a few times while on my old rig,
I came up with doing my updates in a chroot and then moving the binaries
over and just emerging the binaries, which is a LOT faster. Even
qtwebengine can install from a binary in just a few minutes. The
compiling process tho can take hours even on my new rig. That's a long
time for packages to not be in sync when trying to do other things.
So, not really emerge. It's just more of a software out of sync
problem. I think emerge has come a LONG ways since 2003 when I started
using Gentoo. Back then, it took some effort to run Gentoo. Nowadays
it is pretty easy really. Now emerge still outputs a cryptic error
message that requires someone with a decoder to figure out but it has
those error messages a lot less than it used too.
I guess what I do is a ounce of prevention so I don't need a pound of
cure. :-D
Dale
:-) :-)
