Alan McKinnon wrote: > > It's more likely a compatibility issue between very specific modules or bits > of code that affect lots of systems. Take for example this elog from the > nvidia drivers: > > === > This ebuild installs a kernel module and X driver. Both must > match explicitly in their version. This means, if you restart > X, you most modprobe -r nvidia before starting it back up > === > > The interfaces that these things use have never been guaranteed to be stable, > and gcc itself is free (within reason) to lay things out in memory anyway it > sees fit. You get the same thing with X and it's drivers too. It makes sense > - > a server and it's drivers should all be part of the same release series and > be > built together with the same toolchain for best results. > > You DON'T get this problem with normal packages. You can upgrade and > downgrade > cairo all day long if you want and firefox won't care - the API it uses is > stable and doesn't change. > > In your case and Mark's, you tried to downgrade something critical but have > no > information about what you should be downgrading to. When you synced portage, > you lost the information about what was the latest arch and ~arch versions. > Upgrade is easy - "emerge latest <arch> for everything, we know it works", > but > portage doesn't offer a rollback function so downgrade is much harder. Once > someone has figured out $LIST, you can "emerge $LIST" and life is good, but > you don't have $LIST yet. > > Logic tells me you had two problems, and gcc is neither of them. Your box > does > not like latest X for whatever reason (problem 1) but you can't rollback to > the last working version of everything involved as you don't know what it is > (problem 2). > > So when all other efforts have failed, downgrade gcc and rebuild everything > is > very likely to fix those problems. > >
While I'm not a dev, I do know this. All I did was downgrade gcc and a emerge -e world. After that, things started working again. X wasn't crashing, Seamonkey wasn't crashing, my USB ports starting working again, my sound started working again and several other little things that were "weird". So far, I haven't changed any config files or any versions of a package. I haven't syncd the tree on this machine either. I didn't want to complicate things any farther with portage wanting to upgrade something else when I'm trying to get back to a stable system, The thing to notice is this, nothing changed but gcc. That's all. It is odd to me that when I upgraded gcc, things started to break. When I downgrade gcc, things start to work again. Since nothing else changed, in my mind, it has to be gcc. I may be wrong but the fact it works is undeniable. I'm all for what works. Dale :-) :-)
