On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: > 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. >
OK, makes sense to me. 1) I only do home machines. My family all over California now runs Gentoo and has for years. Windows no longer exists anywhere except in VMs. Clearly I can see why someone running production machines wouldn't want to do that. 2) I forget the -1 sometimes when I do an individual package update. However I generally remember to go back and hand edit the world file once a quarter or so and remove anything that isn't a real application, etc. Glad I wasn't sounding too negative. It wasn't my intention. Cheers, Mark
