Unbreakable (almost) [LWN.net]

Unbreakable (almost)

Posted Nov 20, 2003 19:15 UTC (Thu) by etwilson (guest, #8459)
In reply to: The Success of Gentoo by dkite
Parent article: The Success of Gentoo

The amazing thing to me is how hard it seems to be to get either portage or the system in general into a broken or wierd state. I've got a seriously bad habit of reconfiguring my home computer constantly; I'm always installing or uninstalling things and I've never managed to break portage and only once managed to (semi-) break the whole system. In contrast, it seems like normal use is enough to corrupt the RPM database on Redhat 9 (the system I have at work).
The one weak link in portage that I see is the problem with updating configuration files, mostly in /etc, after running an update. The utility etc-update" mostly does the right thing but: a. you have to remember to run it; b. its manual editing feature is pretty hard to use. Mis-using etc-update is how I managed to break the system that one time, it was a simple thing to fix but it took me a day to figure it out.

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Unbreakable (almost)

Posted Feb 20, 2004 14:33 UTC (Fri) by xentric (guest, #19628) [Link]

Mistakes with etc-update are a very common problem for people new to Gentoo. I have written a script (with ebuild) that makes updating a little less dangerous and a lot easier. The script is called cfg-update. See: GUI alternative for etc-update -> cfg-update It determines if configuration files have been modified after being installed by portage and presents both the original and update in a graphical diff/merge tool of your choice (default is xxdiff). Unmodified files can be updated automatically and you can easily restore the backups if you encounter any problems.