On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 2:03 AM n952162 <n952...@web.de> wrote: > > Well, what you say is likely true, but does "old software" really need > to be kept working? Couldn't problems necessarily only be dealt with > in the newest versions? >
I think you are misunderstanding what actually went wrong in your situation. Nothing broke in your existing software. You're using an old version of portage. It will continue to work as it always has. However, you wanted to use it with a newer version of the software repository. This contained a package that wasn't compatible with old versions of portage. The version of portage you're using detected this, and refused to install it, so as to not randomly break your system. Your system continued to work as it always had. You just couldn't install that particular package, or anything that depends on it. Generally we try to maintain a reasonably sane upgrade path going back maybe six months or so. You just needed to update portage first. If your system is more than a month or two out of date just running emerge -uD world or whatever blindly is more likely to run into a problem. It shouldn't break your system unless you go adding random options to the command line to override safety features, but it might involve a few steps (like updating portage, @system, and so on before trying to update everything). It usually isn't unmanageable, but Gentoo is definitely not an LTS-oriented distro. If you want to only get security fixes for three years and then update everything in one go, then stick with something like RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, or debian stable. Those distros deliver exactly that sort of experience, and really there isn't as much benefit to something like Gentoo if you're just going to update it every other year anyway. -- Rich
