emerge -u system stomping on /etc/*?

[kirvero]

Hi-

I've been a happy gentoo user for several months. I originally bought a 1.4rc2 cd and was until yesterday was running happily on a system that was current as of probably February.

Yesterday I decided to update using

emerge sync
emerge -u system

After having a series of strange problems I rebooted, and when the machine didn't come back up I discovered that something stomped on most everything of value in /etc during the upgrade process. Among others, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/fstab (!) contain their original gentoo-installation values. /etc/fstab for instance references /dev/BOOT, /dev/ROOT. Yikes.

I had to merge a bunch of config files during the upgrade, but I didn't notice any of those critical files mentioned.

What happened? What did I miss? What can I do to keep this from happening in the future?

Thanks-

Jonah

[Cheesefoam]

It sounds like your CONFIG_PROTECT variable got set to "-*" or something like that, and when portage went to update your etc files, figured there was nothing there worth keeping and overwrote it with the new package files.