David Haller schrieb:
Hello,
On Sat, 13 Aug 2016, Andreas K. Hüttel wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 10. August 2016, 12:54:37 schrieb hw:
I?m trying to upgrade portage because I?m getting a message that it
needs to be able to work with EAPI 6 packages and can only do EAPI 5.
[..]
If you see this now, your production server hasn't been updated for a long
time...
As a last resort, you should be able to run a "non-installed" portage version
to update your system once. Manually download and unpack a recent portage
tarball somewhere temporary and then run as root something like
porto tmp # ./portage-2.3.0/bin/emerge -uDNav world
This can update your system to the newest state, including updating the
installed portage. Afterwards you won't need the temporarily unpacked portage
anymore.
Yep. BTDT. I had a then 4-4.5 year old gentoo quite broken by being
partly updated until portage/emerge broke and much else didn't work
anymore (gcc/make/python/emerge). So, I booted something else, mounted
gentoo somewhere (say /mnt), unpacked a fresh stage3 _into_ that
mountpoint into /stage3 (i.e. "/mnt/stage3"), chrooted there (with the
usual /sys, /proc, /dev bind-mounts) and then ran stuff from the
/stage3/ tree[1] until the basic stuff (mainly above mentioned 4) was
fixed.
How would it fix the system you chrooted from? Doesn´t it remain limited
to the chrooted environment?
From then on it mostly went "smooth", by the "textbook",
considering. Yeah, lots of conflicts and whatnot because of moves,
renames and new deps etc.pp. It was a bit tedious, but not difficult.
And this general tip came out of it: unmerging stuff helps to break
tangles. Like slashing the Gordian Knot ;)
When I unmerge stuff, that stuff doesn´t work anymore, so I´d have to
do that at night.
And now I cannot emerge gentoolkit after unmerging it, which isn´t useful
at all.
Before you yourself get stuck in the same tangles that emerge did,
be bold, take note and switch to a "unmerge + reemerge" strategy!
I.e. take one offender, note it down (textfile and/or paper), unmerge
it, try a re-emerge of that offender or a @world without it. Keep
adding to the "offenders" list until emerge comes up "clean". Then try
re-emerging the offenders one by one.
It's one of the first things I do when weird stuff/conflicts crop up.
Before I mess with useflags and masks and whatnot, I unmerge both
tangled packages (and keep track of anything I unmerge in a textfile
or so!) and then try to merge only those (with '--pretend --tree' at
first). Emerge IMO handles the "install" case much better and the
conflicts are often much clearer, "obsolete" deps can be ignored
and/or handled later by "emerge @preserved-rebuild".
And once I've figured out what's going on, it often is just one
useflag, or one (un)mask or something else in /etc/portage/package* to
clear it all up.
And finding that is much easier doing it one-by-one.
Still it is extremely tedious.
Of course, you can't unmerge stuff like gcc/make/python/portage just
like that, that's when an unpacked /stage3 comes into play. But you
should not need that until your system is _way_ outdated (as was
mine).
IMO, it´s a silly bug that portage cannot be updated because it cannot
deal with packages it needs to deal with in order to update it. Someone
created this problem, and they should have thought about what they were
doing and have created a way for the package management to handle this
problem.
Anyway: so, yes, you can use a unpacked up-to-date /stage3 for
bootstrapping an update once your system is so (ridiculously) outdated
that a normal update breaks, and not only for installing a new system
:)
Three months is not "ridiculously outdated", yet the update doesn´t work.
1.5 years isn´t "ridiculously outdated", either --- maybe a bit old, but
what´s the problem?
Of course, you'll have to deal with new/renamed/moved/gone packages
and such stuff, but that's to be expected[3].
Perhaps you can do that when you´re an expert user of the packagage
management and have lots of time on your hands. I just need to update.
And IIRC that strategy
had me upgrading quite smoothly to the new perl-5.24 (from 5.20 or
.22?) just recently. At times, emerge _does_ get somewhat stuck. And
it's output gets confusing to match.
There was a version in between, and the update failed. The output of
emerge is very confusing and doesn´t tell me much, if anything, and
I haven´t had the time to finish the update yet. That´s going on
for a month or two now, and it´s still not updated.
But! Usually, when your system is not too much out of date, emerge
does a _very_ good job, it's output is a bit hard to read though,
something IIRC the devs are the first to admit, but as Neil and others
prove here often (I'll try to get more into helping too), you can get
used to it and pinpoint the actual reason for emerge barfing tons of
text on you.
It would already be much easier if emerge wouldn´t print darkblue on black,
which makes it even harder to read the output ... The messages are cryptic,
and you have to guess what they are trying to tell you.
