Apparently, though unproven, at 15:33 on Monday 07 February 2011, Neil Bothwick did opine thusly:
> > An `emerge -e world` may break things, but it's not usually that likely > > to. > > An emerge -e world is not likely to break things in itself, but the steps > that require it, such as changing CHOST, are. The extra steps of a > reinstall over trying to fix a machine with a borked > binutils/glibc/whatever can be far more time consuming, not to mention > frustrating, than a reinstall, and may only be fixed by a reinstall > anyway after all that. > > I'm not an advocate of reinstalling normally, this installation is three > years older than the computer running it, but when performing drastic > low-level surgery, I believe it should be contemplated. If you're a gambling man, play it by the numbers: A re-install for a Gentoo user with a clue is a certain 1 hour of your life tops to get it redone with a recent stage 3, more likely 30 minutes. That will give you a working system albeit one a bit out of date that emerge -avunD world will fix nicely. Trying to fix the existing system complete with it's borkage is very uncertain. Maybe it's 5 minutes, maybe it's 2 hours, maybe it's three days on this list scratching heads before eventually giving up and re-installing anyway. Personally, I long ago proved I can do #2. I like the certainty from #1. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
