Apparently, though unproven, at 17:18 on Thursday 10 February 2011, Stroller did opine thusly:
> On 8/2/2011, at 9:55pm, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > ... > > If you're a gambling man, play it by the numbers: > > > > A re-install for a Gentoo user with a clue is a certain 1 hour of your > > life tops to get it redone with a recent stage 3, more likely 30 > > minutes. That will give you a working system albeit one a bit out of > > date that emerge -avunD world will fix nicely. > > That makes no sense to me at all. > > There are stage3s built on a daily basis - they won't be out of date at > all. But they don't include system logger, cron, locale, or any of your > personalisations. All I'm saying is it is often better to go the reinstall route which will take a known amount of time for a certain result, rather than the try fix it route which is highly variable as to how long it will take or even if it will work at all. It's assumed that one has backups of world and all configs, or can make backups before starting the reinstall. As with all things YMMV and real circumstance trumps abstract theory every time > > On any kind of complex system it will take me more than a day to set those > up - can I be sure that I'll get them right first time, every time? > > If we're talking about an older system then I need to back up everything so > that I can copy files the files I missed from the /etc to the new one. > > If you're talking about stuff like KDE then that alone is going to take > more than an hour to compile. > > I understood that a backup that was of your own system - that might be a > bit out of date but which includes these things - was called a stage4. And > in that case you're still faced with the problem that it's probably just > as out of date as the install which is proving difficult to update in the > first place. > > My experience of a system which was a year or even 18 months old was that > it did have some blockers and some bugs which had been addressed here > months before. It did require me to pull some files out of Gentoo's CVS > attic and emerge the old ebuilds from my local tree, before they could be > updated to current. But I knew that the configuration was sound and that > all I had to do was address the blocker and then resume the `emerge -ud > world`- the emerging is something that can go on in the background whilst > I'm not paying attention. > > Stroller. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
