Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes [LWN.net]

Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes

Posted Sep 1, 2006 16:16 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes by djmutex
Parent article: Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes

All of the persistant problems I've had with Gentoo so far have been fixed by leaving it running the way it is for a day or two, syncing, and trying again.

I agree that portage needs work, but I think the main issue is that it needs to be able to simultaneously merge multiple updates (to deal with the case where the state before is fine, and the state after is fine, but there are conflicts preventing any series of individual steps that doesn't include removing a package in between; it only comes up on occasion, but, when it does, it's scary, since you have a period when your system doesn't have /bin/login or something) and it needs to have back pressure in the dependancy solver (e.g., new versions of package A require versions of package B which are masked; treat those new versions of package A as masked, and thus the less-new version of A is the newest acceptable; or new versions of glibc only work with the nptl USE flag, which is not set, so those versions should be treated as masked unless the USE flag gets set).

I do think that it needs the ability to sync only a single package, and it should do this automatically if trying to build it fails (I've had a number of days when version N is current for my middle-of-the-night sync, but N+1 is current and the files for N, which was badly broken, are gone in the morning when I try to install it; it'd be nice if portage would work this out without requiring a manual and full --sync). I find that the speed isn't bad if I sync from a nightly cron job, so it's done all of the slow and uninteractive stuff when I'm not waiting.

Oh, and today's quibble: glibc-2.4 depends not only on having a recent gcc, but on that gcc being the compiler used to build with. Yesterday, it built me gcc 4.1.0, and then aborted trying to build glibc-2.4 with the still-default gcc 3.3.x. Portage ought to know that, if you depend on a particular version of a slotted package, it needs to make sure that you actually use the selected version.

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