I found out a computer of mine has been working with a bad memory configuration which could lead to wrong values (sometimes failing on memtest). Not only did it freeze during a world update, but it was also running this way for a long time.
So I guess some binaries might have errors on it, due to memory corruption during compilation and linking. (Although the errors seems to freeze the system immediately, preventing any kind of long term effects (like installing a broken version) I suppose it's better not to trust that...) What's the best way to make sure the system is recovered? Reemerging everything (-e) might fail if some essential package is already broken, right? -- Nuno J. Silva gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
