211103 John Helmert III wrote: > An "upgrade path" to me sounds like not just a world update, > but also includes other stuff > that might be necessary to get a system fully updated, > like temporarily setting PYTHON_TARGETS to upgrade a package. > A system without an upgrade path would seem to be a system > where there is no way to upgrade it without reinstalling, > which you seem to be asserting is the case for this system.
The Council resolution doesn't seem to have been well-thought-out : why "1 year" & however could anyone measure that ? what counts as an upgrade path ? -- problem-free or possible with some work ? The basic problem is that Portage isn't capable of resolving all conflicts. In order to do that, a great deal more programing work would be necessary, which the hard-working volunteer developers are unlikely to have time for. That means that users must put in a bit of their own time & use some good sense based on experience to find a path for themselves. People who can't do that shouldn't try using Gentoo. I've been using Gentoo on all my machines for > 18 yr now & have never tried to do 'emerge world' without '-pv', and I've almost always been able to find my way thro' fairly quickly. I have updated year-old systems occasionally with success. You have to make a list of the pkgs which need updating -- either by 'emerge -pv world' or via 'eix-sync' output -- , then work thro' the list updating a few pkgs at a time, starting of course with the most fundamental, eg system pkgs. That way, problems are usually easily identified & often simply disappear when you put them aside & emerge further pkgs. There are some regular blockages which require unmerging a set of pkgs -- eg notoriously the Qt pkgs -- , then remerging all of them together. Some problem pkgs can simply be left as they are & everything still works. If you expect Portage to do all the work for you in the background, it isn't going to succeeed. HTH -- ========================,,============================================ SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
