On 01/01/2012 05:40 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
I'm not clear. Why does one ever bother with emerge -u package? In 10 years of Gentoo I've managed to get by with basically either emerge package to add something or emerge -DuN @world to stay updated. (or @system in the old days but no longer...)
Usually it's because a world update wants to do both trivial version bumps and replace major software at the same time. I can't take a server down for an hour in the middle of the day to update Apache, but I can bump timezone-data, sure.
Even when there aren't any major packages, sometimes I'll do the smaller ones in chunks, so that if something breaks I don't have to revert 300 packages.
Not picking on anyone but in my mind emerge -u package _should_ add the package to the world file because any time I run emerge with a package name and without -1 I'm telling it to make it part of @world. If it's not part of @world, and is already on the machine, then emerge -DuN @world is the right way to get it and everything else updated.
No offense taken, that's why I asked. I can almost never get away with a full world update except on my personal machines, so the way --update works is important to me.
Adding unwanted packages to world is especially bad because there are things like amavisd-new that have undeclared (optional?) dependencies on miscellaneous perl packages. After a few months, I don't remember which perl packages I wanted vs. which ones portage stuck in there by accident, so the world file just grows and grows.
Adding --oneshot to the default opts is probably the way to go when I'm ready to concede that I'll forget -1 occasionally. It feels dirty, though.
