Exorcise in futility :)

[liquiz]

I have been running gentoo on a sparc ultra 5 for about 6 months now. Its a system that I brought into work so that I would have a stable linux box to work from.

For the past 6 months I have been installing the patches/updates as they are available using emerge -u -D system/world.

During this time I have seen several important patches/updates go through for things like gcc and other libraries.

Last week I wondered what it would take to recompile everything and what the correct procedure would be.

I started out with an emerge -e system which only compiled 54 out of the 81 packages. I followed that up with another one which seems to have compiled everything.

I came in monday morning and did an emerge -e world and suffice to say its still compiling the 241 packages that are on the system

I was a bit suprised to see that some if not all of the packages in the system emerge also showed up again in the world emerge. Anyone have any ideas/thoughts on this.

Peace,
Liquiz

[labrador]

I don't know why you would want to recompile everything. Because
you can? This is Gentoo. Everything WILL be recompiled, eventually.
So the question is, what is the rush?

It does take a long time to compile a system and many of
the applications on Sun Ultra boxes. Perhaps you started
with a stage 3 when you installed?

If there is little difference betwen system and world, perhaps
you don't have many applications installed?

[liquiz]

Hello Labrador

I do know that at some point in time almost everything will get re-compiled since things do end up getting updated.

Yes I did the re-compile because I could and since its not a production machine I figured all I would loose would be some speed on the system. Which is what it turned out to do but it did catch up all the files to the current rev of gcc etc ...

There appears to be a difference of about 160 packages between system and world and as you pointed out the ultra 5 isnt exactly blindlingly quick So recompiling 81 packages would be something I would like to avoid.

This does bring up another question which is probably more serious than recompling things twice.

1. If there is an incompatibility between gcc or one of the other major parts and a program. Using the eventually everything gets updated approach, doesnt that just leave you open to having a problem but not really knowing what caused it?

[labrador]

The formula of using simply emerge sync followed by
emerge -u world is a bit simplistic. You mentioned the -D switch -
that should take care of rebuilding dependancies on the
package being updated - which is what I suspect you are
concerned about.

There are sometimes days when stuff breaks for reasons
that the ebuild or portage system just didn't consider the
need to fix something, or portage just doesn't do what people
need (yet). For example with the recent gcc update, many people
had to manually run fix_libtool_files.sh to repair library files.
Such is life with Gentoo. Sometimes things get out that
are missed by the QA process, and sometimes I think we
are all part of the QA process. However, you are never dead
in the water for long, and normally you can still run the previous
version of your applications until the problem is fixed or a solution
found.

There was an excellent thread on the forums a few months ago
where someone argued against the use of the -U switch to
emerge. He then went on to prescribe this series of steps
to maintain Gentoo: