Apparently, though unproven, at 01:10 on Thursday 09 December 2010, Trifu Catalin Florin did opine thusly:
> Hi all > > I'm struggling for several weeks to get my systems up to date. I have two > systems which haven't been updated for an year or so. > I have also opened a topic on the gentoo forum that can be found at this > address: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-852377-highlight-.html > > > As you will see in that topic, the error was related to a circular > dependency between gcc and glibc. I didn't manage to solve the problem but > tonight I had an other error. I had this a while ago. IIRC it was something to do with going directly to glibc-2.11 but the version numbers don't matter. The solution is to upgrade one package to a version less than most recent that DOES NOT cause blockers. Then emerge world and it will all be fine. In your case, emerge a glibc-2.10 first, then world. > On one of the systems, the symlink between /etc/make.profile was broken. I > have discovered when I have tried to do emerge --update --deep world. I > don't know why > > and I'm a little bit scared because I couldn't find anything in the bash > history that could have give me a clue of the mistake I have made which > lead to the destruction of > > that symlink. This would be my first question, did anyone experienced the > same problem? Does anyone has any idea of a mistake that could lead to > this result? I have no idea. I also have absolutely no way to help you as you haven't said what the symlink is. You are basically saying "My box is broken. What's wrong? Please help!" I can't answer that. Post output of "ls -al /etc/make.profile" > I have mapped /etc/make.profile with another profile and I have tried to > update the system again. This time, the error thrown by portage was > something related to xz-utils, > but unfortunately I didn't copy the error. Then you must run it again, copy the error and post it. We cannot help you without that. You probably have the recent blocker on xz-utils. > Can anyone tell me a brief > explanation of what a profile is and how does it affect my system? A profile is basically a definition of the minimum packages needed to get a working system. You must have a toolchain and python for instance, so a profile will tell portage to include these and they must be there. Different architectures have different needs and profiles cater for these as well. A profile is a bunch of files in a directory. If you look in one you will find things there that are similar to what you created in /etc/portage/* and they tend to work the same way. > What is > the difference between the > > profiles listed under /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/2008.0 and > those listed under /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/10.0 ? 10.0 is the current profile 2208.0 is an old one To find the differences, you must compare the files in them. > Can you > please tell me what should I > read in order to find more information about this profiles? Read the portage install docs at gentoo.org Read the man pages for portage. there's about 10 of them. Read them all. Then read this to find out how to best ask list questions and get good answers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html > > Thank you in advance! -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
