On 13 May 2009, at 15:27, Alan McKinnon wrote:
...
It's just that I remember all too well what it took to get through
those many
various blockers. More often than not I was once of the first to run
into them
- I sync and update daily - but I'd hate to do it all again all in
one go,
especially when all my buddies here have forgotten the procedure.
I think it does help if one upgrades a week or two after everyone
else. I upgrade my main systems only every 4 - 12 weeks, and whenever
I have a problem I look in the list archives and a clear upgrade
procedure has most always been described.
I upgraded a 2007 system to current only a few weeks ago, and I
encountered ALL the portage, mktemp, com_err, util-linux & sys-libs/ss
problems. Honestly, it was not so bad. All these problems were clearly
documented on the list - perhaps by yourself! - and I was able to
overcome all of them in the course of an afternoon. The system was
down for a couple of hours because I was hasty & impatient at one
point, but in my case the significant cause of delays was that the
machine is an old Duron 800mhz & took time with its compilation. With
a faster machine I could perhaps have done all these upgrades within
an hour.
Grabbing old versions of ebuilds from the attic is a bit of a pain,
you wget them, rename them, copy them into /usr/local/portage, create
the manifest and it's only when you try to emerge them that you find
you also need a .patch file. But all these blockers are overcome just
by upgrading the various packages in a straight-forward order.
I reread Alexey's post after replying to yours, and the reason he's
having problems is because he's being careless. If you break the
system, it's obviously a gamble whether you'll get your ass out of the
problem you created for yourself. If you want to be sure of not
breaking the system then you have to be cautious, resolve EACH and
EVERY dependency in turn and not just go "fukkit, i don't know what
that package does so, i'll ignore or unmerge it, upgrade this other
package to the latest version and hope everything resolves".
Stroller.
