On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:50:32 +0100, Leif B. Kristensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tuesday 22 February 2005 06:07, Aaron Walker wrote: > > Mark Knecht wrote: > > > The Gentoo developers and package maintainers really do a great job > > > of making Gentoo work. > > > > > > Thanks! > > > > Thanks for the thanks! Sometimes users forget we volunteer to do > > this stuff, so it's nice to see these kind of mails every once in a > > while ;) > > While I certainly agree with Mark in what a remarkably great job the > Gentoo developer's community are doing, I'm a little uncertain about > the meaning of running emerge -e. > > Okay, it's nice to have the opportunity of doing so, but I can't help > the feeling that you could accomplish exactly the same with a normal, > incremental emerge over time. The other alternative is of course if you > have done something really radical with your USE flags, you may run an > emerge -avuD --newuse world, as I have done a couple of times. But I > can't, for the life of me, see the reason to run a full reemerge of > everything unless something is seriously broken. > > In which case I rather do a complete reinstall, -- God forbid. > -- > Leif
Hi Leif, In general I completely agree. This machine has been very stable and up for about 15 months at my dad's place. He dropped Windows and became a Gentoo user. Everything had gone very well just doing the normal emerge sync / emerge world routing for a long time. Recently the machine developed a strange problem where Evolution wouldn't connect to the Internet. I messed for days with all the stuff you would normally guess to be the root cause of that sort of thing but nothing we did got it to work. Researching on the Internet I found it to be a fairly common problem and that about 60% of people who had the problem fixed it with the distro equivalent of emerge -e gnome. Sort of as a last resort I tried that since I figured it could get done overnight. It rebuilt about 260 packages and Evolution was fixed. At that point I could have stopped but since my dad was traveling and the machine was just sitting there, and because the emerge -e gnome had emerged a new glibc and gcc, a new xorg-x11 and a few other pretty basic things, I decided that I'd like to do the other 200 packages not covered by emerge -e gnome. Not thinking it was worth the time to script the whole thing I just kicked off the -e world, which rebuilt the same 260 packages a second time, along with the other 210 or so that were not covered. It all worked except for 1 package (nforce-audio) and that one is fixed in ~x86. Anyway, I really agree. I don't like the idea of completely rebuilding the machine just because something doesn't work. Over time you are pretty much correct - everything gets rebuilt, but iIn this case, with him out of town and the opportunity in front of me to make the machine like brand new, I didn't see any reason not to try. Gentoo is really a pretty amazing distribution and the developers do a great job. I just wanted to say thanks. Cheers, Mark -- [email protected] mailing list
