On Friday 16 June 2006 23:36, Vladimir G. Ivanovic wrote: > On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 15:01 +0200, Hemmann, Volker Armin wrote: > > --deep is almost never needed. Some people love it and tell everybody to > > use it. Usually people who are version number freaks. But in 90% it is > > useless to harmfull. > > Could you be more specific, please? How is it harmful? What happens to > your system when you use --deep?
because sometimes a lib/dependency may be upgraded to an incompatible version, resulting in open and hidden breakage. > > Why is it that despite --deep being recommended[1] and used (I assume) > by the majority of Gentoo users, I haven't heard of any ill effects of > using --deep? (You are the first and so far the only person to recommend > against it.) IT IS NOT RECOMMENDED! Read again! Code Listing 13: Updating your system # emerge --update --ask world owever, it will only verify the versions for the applications you have explicitly installed - not the dependencies. If you want to update every single package on your system, add the --deep argument: So it only says 'if you want to update everything' not 'we recommend it'. Oh, and it says 'sometimes to catch security updates'. Not 'everytime you update'. You can catch the security updates by being on the gentoo-announce mailing list. No need for --deep. > > I *always* use --deep when upgrading because then I am assured of > getting *all* of the dependencies of packages I am emerging. I am not > aware of *ever* having system problems due to using --deep. How do you > prevent packages from being installed that are missing dependencies? I don't prevent packages installed with missing deps. Portage does this. You don't need --deep to 'Get all dependencies' portage will does that for you. --deep upgrades everything in your system,which is totally different from dependency solution and might break stuff, because a dependency might get upgraded to an incompatible version. I am using gentoo since 1.0 And for some time, I used --deep. Until I got A LOT of breakage. KDE here, enlightenment there, XFCE too, this game started to be crashy, that application did not show jpegs/gifs/png anymore and so on and so forth. I have seen the damage --deep can do first hand, and I strongly recommend not to use it. Security updates - that is what gentoo-announce is for. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
