On 8/6/21 2:37 PM, n952162 wrote:
On 8/6/21 2:16 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
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However, you wanted to use it with a newer version of the software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.
I think that doesn't characterize my point quite.
I was complaining, mostly, that isodate had to be the thing that was
incompatible with my configuration. Maybe there is a unavoidable reason
that that package had to move to the newest EAPI, or maybe it was just a
sense that it's cool to be with the cutting edge. It seems to me that
isodate (which is actually tied, perhaps indirectly, to clearly slow
United Nations rule-making) must be pretty stable.
Generally we try to maintain a reasonably sane upgrade path going back
maybe six months or so. You just needed to update portage first.
My update was two months late.
If your system is more than a month or two out of date just running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,
I don't have the expertise to do something like that.
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.
Those distros are not source distros. I'm making an argument that
there's a large space between binary distributions and source
distributions that pass every upstream change down in realtime. Gentoo
is in the best position to service that space
I see that that begs the question of why someone would be interested in
a source distribution.
With a binary distribution, you fly on trust. With a source
distribution, you do, too, given the size of the code base.
The difference is, with a source distribution, there's a "paper trail"
that can be followed back if that trust was abused.
That's just about impossible with a binary distro.
