On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: > As a regular reader of gentoo-user, if someone has not updated in more than > a year, we almost always recommend a re-install. Maybe save /etc, /home and > the world file and then start from scratch on the rest. As a user since the > 1.4 days, I would never expect that much backward compatibility. The OS > just has to many changes to be able to do that.
Something I've done when I've really borked up my system is to just save /etc, backup, etc, and then extract a stage3 over my root filesystem. That gets all of my system packages into a working state. Sure, some packages may not work, but many still will. Then an emerge -e world or whatever will clean things up. Sure, you'll end up with a lot of orphan cruft, but that probably won't hurt anything. After a few months of happy operation various orphan-finding scripts can help with cleanup. This may not always work, but is probably easier than a full rebuild.
