Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Tuesday 16 September 2008 20:43:06 Dale wrote:
I have used --skipfirst before but I also don't think it is a good
idea. For a idiot like me to say that must mean something. I guess it
would depend on the package as to whether it could be skipped or not.
If I do a emerge -e world, I prefer nothing to fail else what is the point?
Sometimes stuff does fail - you can't fully know beforehand if an ebuild will
succeed or not. --skipfirst is perfectly safe if you have looked at the
package list and know that there's no dependency issues. The danger is
blindly resuming without understanding the consequences.
For example, lets assume there's a package called alan-fonts-meta which
depends on 20 fancy wingding-type fonts. Lets also assume that I was a dork
when coding one font ebuild at 4am and botched the SRC_URI. That ebuild will
fail, but you know for sure that you can safely --resume --skipfirst
(followed by a scathing email with a blunt instrument as payload).
Other examples exist. OTOH, if the expat upgrade of some months ago failed, a
blind resume would likely have caused endless troubles.
That was my point in a round about way. If you don't know, don't use
--skipfirst since it could mess up some stuff and turn your puter into a
mess after logging out or a reboot. I'm thinking some of the more
serious system packages with that.
Me, I don't even claim to know so I either ask or fix what borked. LOL
Dale
:-) :-)
