On 04/08/2015 20:30, Felix Miata wrote: > Grant Edwards composed on 2015-08-04 17:20 (UTC): > >> Felix Miata wrote: > >>> That's right, May 2011, my first and only Gentoo installation, 32 bit on an >>> old Athlon, which means no sse2, and kernel 2.6.37. It coexists in multiboot >>> on one HD with 12 installations of Fedora and openSUSE. I'd like to upgrade >>> it rather than installing fresh, > >> Can we ask why? > > Because, assuming it's feasible, I can? :-)
There's two ways to approach this. 1. The just get it done approach - for this you re-install 2. The figure out how it works and learn something approach. For this you upgrade. Which one you desire is of course up to you. > > 1-I just find upgrade processes more enjoyable than inital installations and > their follow-up tedium getting from defaults back to the way I like things to > work. > > 2-From one installation to the next, I typically forget installation choices > that in hindsight I would not have made. > >>> if it's doable. > >> It probably is (for some degnerate value of "doable"). > >> My gut feeling is that a fresh install is going to be a _lot_ easier > > For some "degenerate" value of easier. :-) > Voice of hard-won experience speaking here: There's an old sysadmin saw about sendmail: 1. You cannot be a /real/ sysadmin till you have written main.cf by hand at least once 2. You are out of your goddamn mind if you do it twice So, you have installed Gentoo once and never touched it again. By all means, upgrade it. Personally, I would rather you had some more experience with the whole regular update process in normal circumstances (emerge world, revdep-rebuild, deal with blockers), but if you are smart and patient it can be done >> and faster. A fresh install will take a couple hours. An upgrade will >> take somewhere between a couple days and a couple weeks. > > Seriously, more than a day? Bwahahahaha! You are too funny! THREE WEEKS is not uncommon for this. I am not joking. Remember, I have done it, and so have many others here. It was fun the first time, now it is just a major PITA > > Now that I've seen several thread responses subsequent to this one, I'm > leaning towared just doing a fresh installation, but I'm curious about what > would happen by trying, and how long it really would take. I haven't read all the other replies, (too lazy), so I'll just stick my thoughts out there. This upgrade is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a large binary distro upgrade (say RHEL 4 to 6). The reason is that you have to update the toolchain, and that changes /everything/. Fedora and friends never use an ancient toolchain to build a new distro. The latest version is always already built for you by the latest toolchain. You are on Gentoo, you need to use an ancient compiler to build the latest compiler. This might even work! But most likely, what you are going to encounter is that it fails somehow. So you will do it in stages and employ much black magic (which will probably be meaningless to you) to get it done. And then you will repeat the whole thing to deal with udev and friends. And then for OpenRC. And then the whole split /usr thing Bash will cause much pain. Oh, I almost forgot, there was that bash completion mess too. Starting to get the idea? What you will /not/ experience, is that a bunch of new files will replace old files and Woot! Success! This is important: On Gentoo, you build the system in-situ. And that changes everything. If you still want to learn how to do it, a loner, easier, and more likely approach is going to be this: Grab a bunch of portage snapshots from somewhere spaced 6-12 months apart for the last 4 years. Unpack the oldest over your existing portage. Emerge world, and deal with the problems. Rinse, repeat till you are up to date. It's a lot of work and for teaching purposes it is invaluable. For practical purposes it is pointless :-) The benefit to doing it is stages is that many smaller upgrades are each manageable and can be done. A 4 year jump probably can't be. > > Skipping or after attemping upgrade, I'd chroot from an existing, probably > openSUSE rather than Fedora, because I have Tumbleweed all the way back to > 11.2 to choose from. Would there be any particular advantage to picking a > particular one to use, with/without systemd, or a kernel version close, or > newer, or older, than that which will be emerged? > > I like that eselect list currently offers a kde sans systemd sans plasma > option. Ultimately what I'd like to do is get Gentoo on at least one of my > much faster systems, but only after enough experience with it to have a > respectable shot at putting Trinity on it instead of any of the more popular > DEs. This machine is a guinea pig for familiarization purposes. > -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
