On Sun, 2009-03-22 at 12:44 +0100, Peter Alfredsen wrote:
> I would say that if you do a complete world update at least every six
> months, followed by revdep-rebuild, keeping Gentoo up-to-date should
> be
> relatively painless, excluding all the blockers you have to resolve.
> ie.:
> emerge -uDNav world
> revdep-rebuild -i -- -a
I've done this on a machine I hadn't touched in over 6 months. And,
surprisingly, I was relieved that it came out fine. Though I did have
the advantage of:
* Having another machine that I upgrade regularly and so know what
to look out for
* I read and react to, if necessary, the elog messages from the
ebuild chatter (I have them sent to my mailbox)
* Checking the bug database if I run into a snag
* General experience on how to maintain a (Gentoo) system
That and, if a particular version does not work out for you, you often
can downgrade to an older version. Or if you don't like the way
something is built, even with the available USE flags, you can usually
keep a simple patch and keep your own version in a private overlay. I
love this stuff. This is why I use Gentoo.
Contrast with another distro I use. I recently upgraded to version n+1
and am encountering all kinds of problems. I have versions of software
installed that don't work or don't work the way they used to, but I
can't go back. I can't install the older versions of packages because
they depend on older versions of libs that no longer exist on version n
+1 (and there are no such thing as SLOTs and revdep-rebuild). And even
if I thought about downgrading the entire distro to version n that
pretty much means a re-install of the entire OS (and then a re-update of
the downgraded OS). I've submitted two bugs for version n+1 but one
that I submitted in January hasn't even been responded to and the other
was quickly closed as a WONTFIX.
Not to criticize other distros (which is one reason why I didn't even
name it), but my point is that they all have their pluses and minuses.
For me at least, Gentoo comes with fewer minuses and when they do come
they are usually easier to fix/get fixed. The caveat is that you
actually have to know/care what you're doing.
