Hello, I have a couple of systems that I do not update regularily (some not even for years). But then sometimes I feel, hey I should do an update. I have one master build server which builds packages and keeps them as binary packages, annd all my systems pull the gentoo portage tree from this master build server, additionally also the configs in /etc/portage is the same amongst all boxes, i.e. use flags et al are all the same.
Now comes the misery when I want to update an old box, because of unsupported EAPI and what not. One way that I used in the past was to extract a stage-3 tarball over the existing root system, and then do the upgrade, which works to some extent, but it does not seem right. Coming now to my question: Is it possible to start a live gentoo system with a recent portage version and then tell portage that it should install the packages in /mnt/gentoo (which is the real system I care about). I have heard about the prefix project, but I'm not sure if this is exactly what I want. Maybe a second approach would be to get the minimal set of binary packages from the master build server and extract them manually, such that I end up with a recent enough portage which supports all EAPIs that are in the tree. But I have no clue how to get the minimal set of packages that I would need to extract. Does anybody have other approaches (besides starting from scratch)?
