Philip Webb wrote:
The defective version of 'patch' had got into 'testing',
where the only remaining problems are supposed to be in the ebuild;
in fact in this case, there was still a serious problem upstream
& that version of 'patch' has been re-masked (I believe).
Anyway, don't do testing on the machine you use for everyday computing.
If you want to get into testing, use a dedicated machine for it.
It's late Friday, so let me stick my neck out again
(grins, sighs & gets another beer out of the fridge).
At least once/month, if not once/week, someone reports on Gentoo User:
"I did an emerge sync, installed the latest blahblah-1.2.3,
did 'emerge world' & something dreadful has happened to my system".
I've been using Gentoo for more than 6 years & it's never happened to me.
I believe the reason is that I follow my own advice as above:
I do install 'testing' versions of non-vital pkgs (eg 'eix')
& items which are well-supported upstream (eg KDE, kernel),
but I am very cautious about installing testing versions of system pkgs
whose collapse would do real damage to my everyday activities.
Even when stuff is well-supported upstream, I give it a few weeks
to see if there are reports anywhere of bad things happening.
Eg I have not moved upto the testing 'eix-0.18.3',
because it requires that I replace 'lzma-utils' with 'xz-utils':
it's not worth the risk of doing real damage elsewhere
simply to get the latest version of 'eix', which is useful but non-essential.
When 'xz-utils' reaches 'stable' (and has a less frightening version number),
I will happily make the upgrade.
Also, I never do a bald 'emerge world'. I look thro' the output of 'eix-sync',
write -- with a pencil+paper -- a list of installed pkgs which have changed,
run 'emerge -Dup world' to see what order of emerging is recommended,
then individually 'emerge -pv <pkg>' & -- if all looks well -- 'emerge <pkg>'.
Yes, it takes a bit longer for my weekly update session (tomorrow Sat),
but I don't risk the nightmare of reducing my system to chaos
with all the extra frantic labor which would result.
Again, I've been doing this for 6 years with Gentoo on 2 machines
& haven't run into any major setbacks.
By all means, ignore my advice & do it your own ways (smile).
I do somewhat similar to you. I just use the -a option instead and I
don't write things down. I just do a emerge -uvDNa world and give it
all a once over, USE flags, what gets updated and if I want it etc etc.
I also run latest on eix, portage and some of its utils. I try to stay
away from unstable system packages as it seems you do as well. I'm
still on baselayout 1 and not planning on the openrc thingy yet either.
May want to get ready tho, it is coming.
I did my first install from a Gentoo 1.4 CD. That was quite a while ago.
Dale
:-) :-)
