On Tuesday 16 September 2008 20:43:06 Dale wrote: > I have used --skipfirst before but I also don't think it is a good > idea. For a idiot like me to say that must mean something. I guess it > would depend on the package as to whether it could be skipped or not. > If I do a emerge -e world, I prefer nothing to fail else what is the point?
Sometimes stuff does fail - you can't fully know beforehand if an ebuild will succeed or not. --skipfirst is perfectly safe if you have looked at the package list and know that there's no dependency issues. The danger is blindly resuming without understanding the consequences. For example, lets assume there's a package called alan-fonts-meta which depends on 20 fancy wingding-type fonts. Lets also assume that I was a dork when coding one font ebuild at 4am and botched the SRC_URI. That ebuild will fail, but you know for sure that you can safely --resume --skipfirst (followed by a scathing email with a blunt instrument as payload). Other examples exist. OTOH, if the expat upgrade of some months ago failed, a blind resume would likely have caused endless troubles. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
