On Mon, 25 Dec 2006 04:52:55 +0300, Mike Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

In Gentoo, the system is updated while you are using it.
This causes us users to modify whatever we're running to suit all these
changes.

As far as I know, Gentoo releases a Reference Platform twice a year. So, you can upgrade twice a year, once a year, once in two years - all as you please. It will be similar to other distros, but better.

I'd rather be able to specify that I'm using like the 2005
profile, and then when I try to do emerge -u world, I don't have to deal
with my applications going from one major version to another major version
all by themselves and then breaking with no easy way to revert back.

As discussed recently in another thread of this list, there are ways to get back easily, backup of the portage tree being one of them. However, I guess your problem can be solved easier - just do not do -u world. Since its goal is exactly to produce what you do not want, why should you? How many packages do you really want to be the latest? If there are a few, it is easy to update them individually; if there are many, you may create a virtual package in the overlay and update it.

I do not here much about upgrade really breaking a Gentoo installation. If it did, then a fresh install also would be broken, an extremely rare case with stable arch. Thus, if something does not work after upgrade, then configuration files are out of order. Gentoo already has everything necessary to examine them one by one and fix as necessary.

Please tell me there's some solution to this? I haven't seen one mentioned anywhere yet. Even with Gentoo's occasional problems, I like it too much to
use any other distro but I'd definitely like to see better version
management than what its got, which is none.

As far as I understand, no, there is no solution. If you upgrade any software, you have to upgrade the dependencies and configuration. All that can be offered, and is offered by many distros, is the upgrade option that should work if you installed the distro and did not change anything. Even that does not work pretty often, please read the reviews. For a Gentoo user the reason is evident - they do not have dispatch-conf. Some vendors have already stopped bragging that an upgrade does not break anything, example - Vista.

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Andrei Gerasimenko
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