Hund wrote: >> My biggest problem with Gentoo was not so much the time needed to >> compile huge ebuilds like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Chromium, but that >> say if you neglected doing updates for a while and then decided to start >> again, then you'd have serious problems. This is because, at least the >> way I understood it, after some time old ebuilds would get deleted from >> the Portage servers to conserve space there, but some of those now >> deleted ebuilds would still be needed as dependencies to do iterative >> updates. The sure-way to resolve this problem would be to re-emerge the >> whole @world set, which of course would take way-longer than just >> Firefox, and might work differently because the '/etc/' configuration >> schema might have changed. >> >> In my case I had some weird problem either emerging some ebuild or >> keeping an old version of an ebuild to keep the functionality or the >> '/etc/' schema removed in the new versions. I just let things sit, and >> moved on to other projects. But when later on I tried to go back to the >> original issue, I had even more trouble because now I was even further >> behind @world, and more ebuilds would not upgrade because of deleted >> dependencies. >> >> So to sum it up, my problem with Gentoo was that you could not just do >> iterative updates after long periods of inactivity. You pretty much had >> to emerge daily and if you had some problem then drop everything and fix >> it right away, or else you'll fall even further behind and eventually >> might have to rebuild @world. And so because constant attention >> intervention and trial and error was required you could not just compile >> huge ebuilds overnight and go about your life during the day. > It's funny how different two people can perceive the same thing. > > One of the very reason I like Gentoo is the fact that I *don't* have to do > daily, or even weekly updates. I'm rather busy with life right now and I just > love how little love Gentoo requires to work, and how reliable it is. I have > never had any issues with postponing updates for longer periods of time. > > -- > Hund > >
Depending on what you consider a longer period of time, you may have just been lucky. There's been a couple threads in the past year or so where people didn't update for a while and had to jump through hoops to get their system updated. I think one just did a reinstall because it was faster and easier. Another did the upgrade just as a learning experience. I seem to recall that a reinstall would have been faster. I'm not sure what was learned tho. In the past, others have had this same problem. It is recommended by long term users not to go longer than 3 or 4 months for a pretty easy upgrade path in most cases. Sometimes depending on changes, that can stretch to 6 months. That said, during some major changes, even going a couple months can cause some serious bumps in the upgrade path. It may be doable but certainly more difficult. Gentoo supports updates up to a year old. Thing is, that means Gentoo and the package manager does, it doesn't mean the packages upstream won't cause some issues or that you won't run into hard blocks that have to be handled manually. I been using Gentoo since 2003. I've read some horror stories on waiting to update for a year or more. It's no fun. Many years ago, it would be almost impossible. Dale :-) :-)
