Keeping Your Gentoo Box Up to Date? (the easy way)

[eno2001]

I'm trying to find a way to keep my Gentoo boxes at home up to date without needing to do a whole lot of baby sitting. It's been my experience that if I get a box to a "perfect" state and it does all I want, I'm fine. Fine, that is, until there's something new I want and I find out that I have a ton of updates to do. Even missing a month's worth of updates can mean days of emerging, revdep-rebuilds, unmerging blocked/deprecated packages, etc... The other fallout is that sometimes things that worked fine suddenly stop working at all because of changes in the way things are done. So here's what I've been doing to try and keep on top of updates. Any Portage "gods" can let me know if I'm doing this all wrong. Here goes:

1. Make sure you set up a local Portage sync server. This is really "easy as pie". Just make sure you have this in /etc/rsyncd.conf:

[martin20450]

Why not use NFS for sharing your portage tree?

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Using_a_shared_portage_via_NFS

[defenderBG]

when i read the postname i though it was a way to keep not the portage tree uptodate but the system (portage tree + newest installs).
I doubt there is any real reason to sync if you are not going to install... it would be better to sync when you really need to do some update. if you update as much as me (once every 2-3-4 months) that this will save a lot of bandwidth.

Making a cron tab which syncs and emerges the changes is thought to be a bad idea... so be warned in putting emerge -auvDN world...

[eno2001]

Hmmm... perhaps I'm missing something. But I thought that the right way to keep my box always up to date with the latest software was to manually run:

emerge --sync

then

emerge -auvDN world

As often as possible.

I found that a lot of times if I haven't run an 'emerge --sync' then packages I want to install usually complain during the wget about certain files not being there and the emerge fails. The only way to get them to build is to run a sync. But after running the sync, then I find that almost anything I want to install that I didn't have or want to rebuild with new USE flags wants to upgrade a bunch of packages. So... may as well save myself the headache and just update my world at that point. And since that takes a lot longer to do if I don't sync the system for months, I think it's better to do it frequently so it takes less time. But, as I said, there's a lot I don't know about Portage and it could be that I'm doing it all wrong. My main goal is to have the latest and greatest as often as possible and avoid really long emerge sessions if I haven't updated Portage tree or packages in a long time. Is that the wrong approach?

[eno2001]

I forgot to respond to your comment about 'emerge -auvDN world' in a script. I thought it was pretty safe since it does nothing until you answer yes/no because of the -a. The only reason I want that automated is that on some of my boxes it can take up to five minutes before that command gives me the full list of what is to be updated and I don't have the time to sit and wait or come back to it.

In the past, I found that if I ran it and then went off to do something else, I'd forget about it and sometimes it would be sitting there for two or three days waiting for me to answer yes or no. By that time, there were already new packages/updates in Portage so the emerge world would be invalid. This way, there's always one waiting for me that has a fresh portage tree, meaning I have the latest and greatest.

However, I do admit that I don't really understand Portage very well so I could be looking at this all wrong. I just want to make sure that when I'm trying to emerge something with a specific set of USE flags and the information I find on the forums here is referring to the newest stuff, that I'm not behind the curve. USE flags seem to change frequently and there are a number of times when I wanted some new functionality and would see a list here in the forums that didn't match my list when running 'emerge -av <package>'. Usually at that point, I'd have to sync and then run the emerge -av again only to find out that five or ten other packages needed to be updated, then a revdep-rebuild, etc... So to try and avoid that, I wanted to keep a fresh tree and a constantly up to date world. Did I misunderstand something in my approach?

Now that you've mentioned that syncing frequently is not necessary. Is it possible that the Portage tree is local and isolated? If so, does that mean that if I don't sync for a long time and want to install something new, or rebuild something with different USE flags I shouldn't have a problem? Finally, is it possible to sync the tree and then somehow pull down every possibly package (regardless as to whether I'll use it or not) to a local repository so that when I build on an out of sync system, it won't have to go to the net to pull down the source tarballs? I simply want to understand the right way to do things.

Thanks for your comments.

[OmSai]

[smitty_one_each]

I just put in a 0200 cron job to do paludis -s, followed by paludis -if everything
It's important to keep the tree up to date, and the packages pulled down, but I'll wait until I get there to inspect the whackiness, tweak any use flags, and do etc-update.
_________________
I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime.--Walsh

[jcat]

eno2001: Apologies for the thread hijack. Just curious, what are you running for your media center?


Cheers,
jcat