On Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 01:36 Andreas Fink <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > I have a couple of systems that I do not update regularily (some not > even for years). But then sometimes I feel, hey I should do an update. > I have one master build server which builds packages and keeps them as > binary packages, annd all my systems pull the gentoo portage tree from > this master build server, additionally also the configs in /etc/portage > is the same amongst all boxes, i.e. use flags et al are all the same. > > Now comes the misery when I want to update an old box, because of > unsupported EAPI and what not. One way that I used in the past was to > extract a stage-3 tarball over the existing root system, and then do > the upgrade, which works to some extent, but it does not seem right. > Coming now to my question: Is it possible to start a live gentoo system > with a recent portage version and then tell portage that it should > install the packages in /mnt/gentoo (which is the real system I care > about). I have heard about the prefix project, but I'm not sure if this > is exactly what I want. > Maybe a second approach would be to get the minimal set of binary > packages from the master build server and extract them manually, such > that I end up with a recent enough portage which supports all EAPIs > that are in the tree. But I have no clue how to get the minimal set of > packages that I would need to extract. > > Does anybody have other approaches (besides starting from scratch)? >
Portage is supposed to offer an upgrade path for any system up to a year out of date. If you grab the version of portage from the last upgrade time of the system being updated plus 6-12 months (however daring you feel like being) you should be able to upgrade it that much without needing to do a lot of fiddling. Repeat until you're updated. Going forward, you could consider having your build host take a snapshot / backup of the binpkgs it builds every 3-6 months, with the associated portage tree, so that you can use those to update your sporadically updated machines. I strongly recommend against overwriting your system with a stage3. Any package that has a changed list of files will leave orphans behind. And finding them all will be pretty dang hard. Personally I just make a point to keep my not very large number of machines updated, but I do it by hand. You might want to look and see if anyone's written any scripts that automatically update + restart services / reboot periodically, and email you upon problem >
