091205 daid kahl wrote: >> 2 pieces of advice to avoid such problems: >> (1) never use the 'testing' versions of system pkgs; >> (2) never run 'emerge world' without the '-p' flag. > I kindly disagree.
Thanks for the "kindly": I thought I'd walked into a high-school locker room. > ~[arch] is testing for Gentoo ebuild. It's considered stable upstream. > This was an upstream bug, not a Gentoo bug. Yes, my comments didn't respond exactly to the problem reported, but offered more general advice which might help avoid such problems. > someone's got to be testing stuff and filing reports upstream. > It doesn't mean you want to do it, but I really think > considering ~ as a test of upstream is rather silly. The defective version of 'patch' had got into 'testing', where the only remaining problems are supposed to be in the ebuild; in fact in this case, there was still a serious problem upstream & that version of 'patch' has been re-masked (I believe). Anyway, don't do testing on the machine you use for everyday computing. If you want to get into testing, use a dedicated machine for it. It's late Friday, so let me stick my neck out again (grins, sighs & gets another beer out of the fridge). At least once/month, if not once/week, someone reports on Gentoo User: "I did an emerge sync, installed the latest blahblah-1.2.3, did 'emerge world' & something dreadful has happened to my system". I've been using Gentoo for more than 6 years & it's never happened to me. I believe the reason is that I follow my own advice as above: I do install 'testing' versions of non-vital pkgs (eg 'eix') & items which are well-supported upstream (eg KDE, kernel), but I am very cautious about installing testing versions of system pkgs whose collapse would do real damage to my everyday activities. Even when stuff is well-supported upstream, I give it a few weeks to see if there are reports anywhere of bad things happening. Eg I have not moved upto the testing 'eix-0.18.3', because it requires that I replace 'lzma-utils' with 'xz-utils': it's not worth the risk of doing real damage elsewhere simply to get the latest version of 'eix', which is useful but non-essential. When 'xz-utils' reaches 'stable' (and has a less frightening version number), I will happily make the upgrade. Also, I never do a bald 'emerge world'. I look thro' the output of 'eix-sync', write -- with a pencil+paper -- a list of installed pkgs which have changed, run 'emerge -Dup world' to see what order of emerging is recommended, then individually 'emerge -pv <pkg>' & -- if all looks well -- 'emerge <pkg>'. Yes, it takes a bit longer for my weekly update session (tomorrow Sat), but I don't risk the nightmare of reducing my system to chaos with all the extra frantic labor which would result. Again, I've been doing this for 6 years with Gentoo on 2 machines & haven't run into any major setbacks. By all means, ignore my advice & do it your own ways (smile). -- ========================,,============================================ SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
