Dear Fellows,
I am revisiting this topic based on previous discussions[1,2,3].
There seems to be a constant need for toolchain with a new EAPI. The
only block is "how can we upgrade from an ancient system?", "don't bump
or the upgrade path will be break". Let's figure out a solid upgrade
path consciously, with a test farm of ancient systems, and then bump the
EAPI of toolchain.
Besides the upgrading guide[4] suggesting a chroot, rich0 had some
experiences with a live overwriting of latest stage3 to /, recently I've
heard from patrick of a script to bootstrap Gentoo lively on an existing
system (be it Debian, Red Hat or an ancient Gentoo).
Here is another alternative from Prefix (upgrading the kernel is mostly
independent):
a. we distribute a stage3 of Gentoo RAP(i.e. Prefix with libc), with
EPREFIX pointing to, say, /tmp/upgrade
b. sync the potage tree in the host system, switch it to the newest
profile.
c. PORTAGE_OVERRIDE_EPREFIX=/ /tmp/upgrade/usr/bin/emerge -e world
It has the same solidity as the chroot while being easier without the
need to mount back and forth. It can track installed files properly as
opposed to overwriting /.
This needs a lot of work to do the testing. At the same time, there are
definitely a dozen of developers who want to bump the EAPI of
toolchain. Let's share the workload.
vapier, if we can figure out a solid and easy solution for upgrading
ancient Gentoo, would you agree on bumping the EAPI of toolchain?
Cheers,
Benda
1. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/86803
2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/73767
3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2841
4. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml
