Hi, Michael Ulm wrote: > Our family computer has many different tasks to perform > and consequently has many packages emerged. Several of > these packages were not available for amd64 stable, so I > got the ~amd64 versions. This of course led to the need > to also pull in ~amd64 dependencies. And those dependencies > grow.
What packages exactly are you talking about? I'm running a pretty stable system here and don't have a big package.keywords list (well, beside GNOME 2.12, modular X and the e17 cvs builds ;)). Just as hint: Use version-specific atoms. This will ensure that you don't always get the unstable version but only the version you really want. By keeping the version low, it will also significantly reduce the dependencies you have to keyword, in most cases. > 1) spending several hours checking out the ~amd64 packages I > emerged, to see if they are available in stable, and which > dependencies can then be brought back to amd64. As spare > time is a rather scarce resource for me, I don't want to do > this unless absolutely necessary This would of course be the cleanest solution. Move your package.keywords file somewhere else and run emerge -uDp world, then check if it would downgrade to a version which didn't work for you. I guess that most of these 50 entries you have wouldn't actually cause a downgrade to happen so it should reduce the effort pretty much. > 2) Go totally ~amd64. I am slightly worried about system > stability in this scenario. Every time the system hiccups > my wife tells me that this never happened in Windows... Although many people run ~amd64 without having any issues, I wouldn't suggest this if you don't like to fix problems and/or spend much time on administrating. > 3) Do nothing and hope for the best. Never change a winning horse. You could just stop doing emerge -uD world at all and only update packages if you know higher versions have new features you need or fixes a bug you hit. Instead of updating all packages, only run `glsa-check -f new` regularly to make sure your system doesn't get vulnerable. This is the way I do it on all my critical systems, and it works. The time I need to administrating is really minimal, about 10 min/mt. for a server and a workstation. I'd say this is even less than with windows ;) > 4) Go Kubuntu. I really like Gentoo, but if system administration > will take too much time, this may be my only path left :-( Disclaimer: I only made experiences with Ubuntu, so it might be that the following is not entirely true. I made the experience that if you want to use anything that is outside a small range of packages (the most popular tool for a task), you have to add various sources to your apt-get list to get those not-so-common packages. For some packages that means that you even have to go back to the debian sources, which aren't made for your Ubuntu system anyway. So you'll have to add things like Universe and so on to your source list to get the things done, which is pretty similiar to using a fully ~amd64 system. I'd personally rather go with option 2) than with 4), but it's up to you ;P Regards, -- Simon Stelling Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
