Hello! I was running the unstable branch of portage primarily for about two years (mostly from user error when I first started), and I finally committed to downgrading to the stable branch last night. I did backups first, and I'm keeping some good logs of any trouble I encounter.
So far, gnome libraries have been the most problematic. I mainly use KDE, but I use some gnome-based things like gimp and the gnome keyring. The fact that I don't run all the components of gnome (and there are almost no gnome packages in my world file) may be the only reason I've had to cleverly rebuild things. However, even revdep-rebuild will not catch most of these problems, and I have to equery errors like: /usr/lib/libgnomevfs-2.so: undefined reference to `g_dgettext' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status For this case, I do a one-shot emerge on gnome-vfs and rebuild the failing package. But I also found some trouble with libbonobo, collisions between gail and gtk+ (where I had to manually uninstall gtk+, and reinstall gtk+ -- rebuilding wasn't enough, and it HAD been downgraded by portage earlier in the process). In the end, it all worked out (the gnome libraries that is, the general process is still underway), but Google was of no avail to most the problems, and I just winged most of it with intuitive order of reinstall, repeated revdep-rebuilds, and using equery b on the libraries causing errors. My question is, when downgrading (upgrading?) from unstable to stable, especially with packages that aren't explicitly in the world file, is this the behavior one should expect, or are these sorts of things worth bug reports? If revdep-rebuild was finding and solving all the problems, I'd say no bug. But when portage can't figure out what the problem is, and it only involved rebuilding installed dependencies in the right order, it makes portage not feel very sleek. I also know that running a system with global unstable keywords is probably not supported, especially for going back to global stable, which makes me feel like this isn't bug worthy. But giving pointers somewhere on how to get around these problems could be useful for someone else in the future perhaps. Input welcome. ~daid
