>>> 2 pieces of advice to avoid such problems: >>> (1) never use the 'testing' versions of system pkgs; >>> (2) never run 'emerge world' without the '-p' flag. >> I kindly disagree. > >> ~[arch] is testing for Gentoo ebuild. It's considered stable upstream. >> This was an upstream bug, not a Gentoo bug. > > Yes, my comments didn't respond exactly to the problem reported, > but offered more general advice which might help avoid such problems. > >> someone's got to be testing stuff and filing reports upstream. >> It doesn't mean you want to do it, but I really think >> considering ~ as a test of upstream is rather silly. > > The defective version of 'patch' had got into 'testing', > where the only remaining problems are supposed to be in the ebuild; > in fact in this case, there was still a serious problem upstream > & that version of 'patch' has been re-masked (I believe). > > Anyway, don't do testing on the machine you use for everyday computing. > If you want to get into testing, use a dedicated machine for it.
My point is that using things out of portage, stable or unstable, shouldn't be considered as testing, as they are upstream stable releases. Doing testing is getting the latest stuff out of git, etc. Of course, there will be bugs in upstream stable code as well, but that's life I suppose. > I've been using Gentoo for more than 6 years & it's never happened to me. > I believe the reason is that I follow my own advice as above: > I do install 'testing' versions of non-vital pkgs (eg 'eix') > & items which are well-supported upstream (eg KDE, kernel), > but I am very cautious about installing testing versions of system pkgs > whose collapse would do real damage to my everyday activities. > Even when stuff is well-supported upstream, I give it a few weeks > to see if there are reports anywhere of bad things happening. There's nothing wrong with running stable gentoo, but as others have commented, one ought to be careful about mixing and matching, for example, ~x86 and x86. Running a stable base system with unstable packages can also lead to a lot of problems, since the code is never really considered to run together on the same system. Although I've only been at Gentoo about half the amount of time, I've run full stable and unstable systems, and I can't say there is much difference in my experience. If I had to generalize, I'd say that on unstable I might hit more bugs, but figuring out what to do to fix the problem is usually much faster. I was planning to switch back soon, actually. One can think of ~arch as either bad because it's so-called unstable, or good because you don't wait 6 months to get something like Firefox 3.5. I use a similar approach to you, and run EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--ask --verbose" If anything looks suspicious, not only will I take note with paper, but I'll likely be sure to get a fresh system backup first as well before proceeding. Regards, daid
