On Saturday 23 August 2003 19:41, Lionel Laratte wrote: > I'm a Gentoo newbie and not a programmer or even all that experienced at > Linux. However, I am a technology manager for what it's worth. Anyway, > I've been following this thread and it occurs to me that doing an auto > emerge world might be better handled if there was some way to --pretend > this a print a log of what would be updated. It could even be a > menu-driven process allowing you to choose what to update. Does this > sound feasible? As I said, I am not a programmer so this might be > totally useless thinking. Just trying to be helpful.
That's quite a good idea. Is there any command to emerge that will extract/apply patches and configure/compile but not actually merge? That would at least show what wont compile properly. As well as that, afterward could just go along and merge whats wanted instead of waiting for it to compile. However, the main point of the thread was packages such as glibc. If an update comes along and gets automatically merged, it has wide affect across the system. The reason most people don't automatically update is because a serious bug could cause the system to become unbootable or even corrupt your files. The self-proclaimed "control freaks" want to first do a background check on such packages to make sure they're okay. This is perfectly understandable as well, seeing that Gentoo is an on-the-edge sort of distro. Now, if you doubt that this sort of thing would happen, I'll give you an example. linux-2.6.0-test3-mm2 came out the other day and compiled fine, but after rebooting there was a segfault in the kernel as soon as the filesystems were checked. Now the kernel doesn't automatically get compiled and installed, but things such as glibc do and the likelyhood of a bug is just as great. Having said that, you may wonder why I do automatically update. As I said before, it's just to try and do my little bit to help the distro. I have all my data on a separate partition and am okay with losing a day or two to rebuild the system if something breaks really bad. I definately would not do it on any machine that is employment related. Regards, Jason -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
