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

Reply via email to