> On 29 Jan 2017, at 20:56, the...@sys-concept.com wrote: > > I haven't updated my system for over a year (1year and 3-months). > I was trying to upgrade my firefox-bin and I'm already running into problems. > > What is my best option, re-install from scratch, upgrade in stages etc. > With firefox-bin I'm getting: > > emerge -p firefox-bin > > These are the packages that would be merged, in order: > …
As others have said, upgrading a system after 15 months isn't _that_ bad. I recently upgraded 2 systems that were, I guess, 18 or 24 months old and I done worse ones in the past. The first thing to do is unmerge Firefox, IMO, and anything else that isn't part of the base system. The priorities are the latest Portage, python, gcc and glibc. If you can update a complete minimal system then you know that you'll be able install apps like Firefox and KDE without any problems. If you can ssh into the system to perform your upgrades, that means you can uninstall Firefox, KDE or Gnome and any other GUI crap you can think of. `emerge --depclean` will clear out a lot of rubbish - you now no longer have to think about these packages during the upgrade process. I would probably keep xorg initially, but remove it if I found it listed during any emerge problems. There have been some problems with perl upgrades in the last few months - you can remove everything in the Perl category, because there are no baselayout or system packaged dependent on it. I've done this process a number of times, and I now use historical Portage snapshots to upgrade the system completely, in steps of about 4 months: https://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/snapshots/ I still think this is less hassle than a complete reinstall. Whenever I install a fresh system I find myself, over the course of a week or so, remembering things I've missed and having to look up little details of how I customise my systems. Upgrading is a lower cognitive load for me - I try something, leave the emerge running for an hour or several hours, and don't have to think about it again until later. One of my hacks is to compile a list of outdated packages in a text file, then apply commands like `for package in $(cat list.txt) ; do emerge -1 $package ; done`. It's dirty and kludgy, but if you have 100 files to update and 80 of them succeed this way, then that's 80 less lines of crap on your screen next time you upgrade world. Stroller.
