On Friday 24 August 2007, Alex Schuster wrote: > Hi there! > > The last expat update was an example of something that annoys me about > gentoo. I usually do world updates every few days, mostly without > trouble. I only tend to forget to restart services, but even for this > there is an automatic solution now (see the recent "Rolling upgrades" > thread). I have even compiled X.org or a new KDE while having KDE > running. > > But then, there are things like the expat update. This happens seldomly, > but if it does, it's rather annoying. Maybe I have become too comfortable > with updating along the way, while working with the system, but usually > it works fine. But in the case of expat, I got a message _after_ it was > updated that I have to revdep-rebuild some stuff (and I know I should > read these messages, but at first I just did not notice until the first > problems hapened).
I can't but agree with you. You have become too comfortable! :)) I am happy that major system (well, desktop) downtime does not happen more often. I was running ~x86 for about a year, more than four years ago and breakages were a weekly if not a daily occurrence. Running stable these days is quite . . . stable(!) with incidents like this taking place less than once a year. On the other hand, I have a box that I don't want to take off line to do this update/upgrade beacuse it is slow and will take the best part of 3 days to complete. Will have to wait for the holiday weekend to get it done. I bet this is not something your average MS Windows user have to concern themselves with - but they are not running a meta-distribution, right? ;) > So, what I would like is some way of being informed that the next update > of some software would cause major trouble and break many things, leaving > the system possibly unusable for a while, and the choice of not doing so > until I have the time to deal with it. Something like a --force option to > emerge, without which things like expat would not be updated. YES PLEASE! I would really appreciate a formal heads up, a couple of weeks in advance, along with instructions if need be; e.g. like the GCC upgrade. > I know, it's not that simple to decide which updates are that critical, > but I think at least in the case of expat we agree that this was a > problem, as e.g. whole KDE was affected. I'd say that toolchain, (big) Display Environments, and Xorg can cause significant disruption and therefore I would include them in a 'early warning' system for gentoo upgrades. > A soution might be to slot expat, and issue a > revdep-rebuild --library=/usr/lib/libexpat.so.0.5.0 afterwards. This > makes all the not-yet-broken apps use the new version, which could be > unmerged afterwards. In the meantime, all would be working fine. > > What do you think? Not sure that would add anything. You would still need to emerge and remerge a lorry load of packages at the end. -- Regards, Mick
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