How many pending updates do you usually have?

[eccerr0r]

Immediately after syncing and your normal update scheme,

emerge --update --newuse --deep --pretend world. How many packages do you see?

Discount emergency updates, like if a GLSA suggested an update and you do it right away on its own.

Question is: do you update everything right away or not?
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[Chiitoo]

First!

Hahahaahgh... ~slaps self~

<ahem> Yeah, I tend to sync daily as a part of my routines so the list never really gets very big (only when something like KDE gets into the mix the list gets a bit longer). That is my main machine. I do have some others lying about that I don't use that often, and as such, may see a bit longer lists.

I do generally update whatever the sync brings up, even if it's just one package.

Oh and I'm always 'unstable' nowadays.
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[John R. Graham]

I'm not covered by the options in your poll. I update often, but I always watch: no cron job updates for me. However, if the KDE team has done a bump that hits the mirrors overnight, I may see 30-50 updates even though my system is updated very often. I do from time to time put off the biggies (e.g., chromium, libreoffice, webkit-gtk) if I have something critical to do on the machine.

- John
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[eccerr0r]

Ah... I'd qualify the updates that you consider mandatory as "done" and the updates you don't consider mandatory at the moment should be counted in the "todo" list... I'm just counting the "todo" list not whether your machine is up to date (assuming that GLSA updates means your machine is at least protected from security holes; a KDE bump tends to not be a security hole but it is a todo :)) I suppose having more than one machine would skew things; probably I should have qualified "main" machine or whatever you use most often, if it's multiple, then average them.

I left my machines with a huge "todo" when gnome3.8 came out much like a lot of large updates because it simply takes a while to get going on debugging merge conflicts... But sometimes things just go fine...

Also I try to make sure as few "N"ew packages get installed... forcing the manual checks and masks/USE flags to prevent those packages from installing...
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[depontius]

What's typical?

I usually update my systems once a week, early on Saturday or Sunday morning. I tend to be an early riser, and the rest of the family is asleep, so it's a good time and a quiet thing to do.

The number of updates varies all over the place. Weekend before last I believe there were only 3 updates on most systems. Last weekend there were somewhere around twenty, plus or minus, depending on the specific system. Sometimes I've seen a "bad week" produce over a hundred updates - that's something like a major X.org update coming at the same time as some sort of Perl update that hits all of the small packages.

For nasty security problems, like Adobe Flash, I do them about as fast as they're in Portage.
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[Chiitoo]

I watch them updates quite closely as well, perhaps because I have done things like patched konversation (just a wee bit) so that it does not pull in pim and friends. Sure, I can just mask other versions, but it's just an example of the tinkering I've become accustomed to.

Gotta keep a lookout for the systemd sort as well (not just bashing here; I refer to things I simply don't want, nepomuk and the 'kits' could be another example along the same lines)... but in the end it comes down to me wanting to know what's happening.

As I think more and more about it, 11-25 packages wouldn't probably be uncommon at all. I do --newuse updates rather seldom these days. I do take a peek occasionally, but if there are no changes that I'm actually interested of, I'll probably let them wait until a version bump.
In fact, if I do one of those right now, it pulls in 21 packages. None of the changes seem to affect me in any way that I can tell tall tales of, so they shall be in the waiting.

Even when I sync daily (without -N), things often do get updated here and there so much that more than 10 is not too uncommon I think. I guess the main thing is that I usually don't wait to update when I know there is stuff to update (but I don't sync more than once a day even if I know something got pushed, unless I really, really want it).
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[NeddySeagoon]

I try to get round all my installs in the course of a month. Some are only touched once, others two or three times.
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NeddySeagoon

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[Fitzcarraldo]

I don't get around to updating as frequently as I would like; I update probably about once a month. I run KDE on my main laptop and my heart sinks every time I see 300 or more packages need updating due to a KDE SC upgrade!

Actually, one of the reasons I don't update as frequently as I would like is that, because of my work, I spend a lot of time travelling and I can't take the risk of updating and breaking the installation during those work trips. If I do succumb to temptation and update while travelling on business, I do it in the hotel at the weekend. I'm running ~amd64 and more often than not have problems with world updates that require time to solve. The last time I updated while away, I kicked off the world update in the hotel room on a Friday night, and finally fixed the last problem at 6 a.m. on the Monday morning before going to work (I did sleep in between!). It's at times like those where I begin to wonder whether I should be using Gentoo Stable or a binary distribution!
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[i92guboj]

Having managed to domesticate the beginner's fever years ago, I can't say I have an update pattern. At least not a simple one.

I usually watch the --ask output, and see what's in there. After more than a decade you can tell what you should update and what has absolutely no importance. It's not rare for me to go picking packages and merging them one by one (always taking care not to spoil my world file). I also maintain my kernel outside portage, and that takes priority over anything else, and is always up to date, unless there's a good reason for it not to be.

Sometimes I am in the middle of something, for example, some qt programming, then I gladly skip anything related to qt, qtcreator, poppler, etc until I have the time to carefully watch over the process and prepare the corresponding bin packages or backups in case something goes wrong. You get the idea.

So, for me it's not strange to have lots of pending updates, but that doesn't mean I am not watching over those. I just apply whatever needs to be applied urgently and skip the irrelevant stuff until I can deal with it. Eventually everything gets updated though. It can be once a week, it can be once a month... sometimes I've been many months without attending massive updates, and only applying the really important ones.

The fact that I have a P4 laptop as my main machine, and that it sounds like a bulldozer while compiling might have something to do with this. Not sure

In any case, when you need a machine to work you learn to watch over it. I for sure won't let any distro packager choose what software is ready to be injected into my OS. In Gentoo you have a good degree of control over that, which is a big plus for me.

[eccerr0r]

Yeah it's nice that Gentoo does have updates but the user chooses when and what to update. All the better because some updates are "dangerous" and may require user intervention...

I do wonder about these packages if someone cronjobs a world update... ouch.... or has someone written their autoupdate script to prevent disasters like Gnome and Apache automatic updates from happening.

I was *very* please with the original init system to openrc update however, that was very clean unlike the systemd migration, and I think an autoupdate on that would not have caused a "surprise" on the next reboot.

Granted, those who emerge --sync and do a manual world update right away regardless, that's a different case but same poll option. If it's a simple merge then usually I'll; just go do it, but if there are any risky packages I always wait until I have time. Checking with --ask/--pretend I do often just to make sure I don't miss a new important package.

However I should depend more on glsa-check -l ...
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[depontius]

Incidentally, it's Saturday morning, the rest of the family is asleep, and I'm doing my weekly service. My desktops are getting 17 updates, one server is getting 16, and the other server is done already, and I didn't notice its count.
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[Anon-E-moose]

I run sync every day from cron.

After I log on in the morning, I look to see what will emerge with either -a or -p, and usually let it run, if it's simple.
If I need to mask something, ie to fix a blocker, or to get rid of some pkg I don't really want, I do that, then emerge and go fix coffee.

I think blindly updating to be rather foolish.


Edit to add: I think there were over 11 this morning, but most were gstreamer pkgs
which has a tendency to produce lots of updates, at least for me.
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