On 26 Apr 2008, at 19:57, Mark Knecht wrote:
...
I don't buy that it's my issue created by a long time between updates.
I could turn on any machine that's sitting in a junk heap or back room
somewhere. It hasn't been powered up in a long time. I log in and want
to figure out what's in front of me with respect to updates. I type
emerge sync and portage deletes files. to me that's just wrong.
As I say, I can get around the problem by simply copying absolutely
everything somewhere else to protect it. It just seems to me that's
not as slick as Gentoo really is. (And I think you know I LOVE this
distribution and have no desire to run anything else ...
To be completely fair, one has to compare this with the situation in
which one digs out of the storeroom an old PC on which a binary
distro has been installed. I have read Ubuntu users complaining that
the easiest thing to do is backup /home and appropriate /etc files
and then reinstall from scratch.
I would say that you can probably get a better result with Gentoo, if
you do backup /usr/portage as you suggest. The chances are that your
old machine is not using the latest profile in its Portage tree - if
you can update to that, and then this is shown as depreciated (but
still existent) in the current tree then I think you maybe have a
fighting chance.
I guess what would be ideal for you is if a frozen snapshot of the
Portage tree was archived every 6 months or so. You could probably
then update sanely from snapshot to the next. But I think you're
probably a "corner case" in wishing this, and I think it'd be
rejected, were it requested of the Gentoo developers. The good news,
of course, is that _anyone_ can make their own Portage snapshot
tarballs as frequently as they like, automating it with cron.
Stroller.
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