Updating a system yearly is almost unfeasible

AchilleTalon

I don't need to keep current my systems and I do not update everything on a weekly, daily or even monthly basis.

When I keep my systems current and update them on a weekly basis at least, the process is almost smooth a hassle free, however, when I am a long time without updating them, portage really sucks. It is almost impossible to update a system after a year or more. It is most of the time faster and easier to just wipeout everything and reinstall from scratch, which is a large amount of work anyway.

After a year, many ebuild disappeared, portage isn't able to figure out how to update, still requires old stuff. Almost everything is broken and need to be examined bit by bit and updated, unmerged, reemerged, use a special script (perl and python in particular, with the right arguments otherwise if fails)

The update process in Gentoo really sucks. Is there any project to build a decent updater for the whole distribution even if when you update on an unfrequent basis?

Right now, I am stucked in a situation I am totally unable to go forward, portage requires a version of an ebuild that no longer exists and ignore completely the current version.

For example:

ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

The main thing is that webkit-gtk needs to be rebuilt when you update icu... So what it the output of:

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

This is no time to be subtle.

AchilleTalon · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2015 1:01 pm Post subject:

AchilleTalon · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2015 1:15 pm Post subject:

Buffoon · Veteran Joined: 17 Jun 2015 Posts: 1369 Location: EU or US

The advantage of a rolling Linux is you do not re-install it every now and then, disadvantage is you have to roll it.

Anyhow, having similar issues in past I simply unmerged all blocks, you may want to keep notes on what you remove so you can restore original setup. Or just back up your world file and replace it with an empty one.

dweezil-n0xad · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2015 2:55 pm Post subject:

Tony0945 · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2015 4:08 pm Post subject:

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

gnome-color-manager shouldn't be anywhere near the @system set. Maybe try @world if you have already tried @system by itself.
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genoobish · n00b Joined: 18 Feb 2015 Posts: 73

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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

I feel your pain OP, you're totally right.

The funny thing with Gentoo is it feels like it takes a certain amount of time to get to a certain update level.

If you don't do any updates, you find you end up spending all that time in one go instead of in bits as is the case if you updated regularly.

My previous system, I stopped updating when KDE3.5 dropped off Portage while I tried to figure out a way to keep it.
By the time I did, it was so out of date that I ended up pulling in new packages manually instead of using emerge --sync and stopped updating world because I couldn't go through the weeks of hell bringing it up to current.

On the bright side, that was one of the biggest motivators for my to get this lovely new Kaveri box ^_______^
(That and the web browser using almost all of the 4GB of RAM the 32-bit system could provide... seriously, javascript and HTML5 is getting out of control....)

If you are only going to update even only every month, you need to develop very good problem-solving skills and get the hang of unravelling the twisted yarn ball that is portage.

If you could 'undo' emerge --sync's it would be a lot easier to muddle through, but one alternative is if you are using btrfs you can take a snapshot of the system, do the sync and upgrade, see what breaks, then roll back the snapshot and prepare for it better.

Other things that have helped me cope with long times between updates:

demerge - This is like a snapshot system for your installed packages, it is extremely cool and very good for undoing botched updates.

https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/
This is a super awesome place where you can pick up ebuilds all the way back to the inception of Gentoo; Combine this with a local overlay and you can usually pick your way though multi-step upgrade blockers by picking up old ebuilds, patches and such from it and putting it into your overlay so emerge can proceed easier without doing some tricky unravelling.

But the bottom line is it does take an increasing amount of time the further away a system is from current. The biggest problem is the longer between updates, the higher the chance some major system breaking change goes through that requires in-depth user intervention (I recently completed an emul-linux -> multilib move; It actually turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated, but if it had been combined with a years worth of updates I'm sure I would have had a much harder time puzzling through it!)

AchilleTalon · Posted: Sat Jun 27, 2015 3:39 pm Post subject:

Guys,

I finally got my system updated with a mix of some of your suggestions. I had to unmerge about three dozen of ebuild (qt mostly) and use the -e flag plus alternate the updates with emerge -av @preserved-rebuild. I stumbled upon a problem I opened a bug report about a year ago and to version later it is still unresolved even if I provided a patch for it, I just make my alternate ebuild using my old patch for this one it worked nicely. I stumbled upon a new bug on the mathgl package which can be easily solved and is probably solved in the latest version of mathgl (currently 2.3.3) while the latest version in the Gentoo tree is 2.1.3. Again, built my own alternate ebuild for this one.

After all this, I am having only a ebuild left which seems not complete the entire process (flightgear) but it is entirely optional here since I am not using it that much.

One last comment, I understand Gentoo is designed as a rolling distro. However, people must keep in mind the goal is to use Linux, not just to install it and maintain it. And even if it is a rolling distro, how far are we supposed to roll without hassle? A day? A week? A month? A quarter? A year?

I mean, sometimes you need a stable version because you are doing actual work (most of the time in fact). You can afford to update minor ebuild, but not necessarily all of them because you are satisfied with something you are using often and is critical at this point in time. You will eventually update it, but cannot afford the burden in time to do it right now or take the risk to introduce an instability.

So, maybe some thinking and brainstorming should be done about the idea Linux is a tool, not necessarily a goal for many of us. Yes, you can tell me to pick another distro, I did in the past, Gentoo is the distro I sticked the longest despited this kind of problems so far. I appreciate the capability to quickly update things other distros will update only in the next release or so. I am just asking, why can't I have everything? A distro I can update quickly and patch quickly and a distro that won't suck my time for many days when upgrading not too often for good reasons? This should be feasible.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Silentsand74 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Jul 2007 Posts: 131

Hello,

Just to be honest I don't perform any major upgrades on my Gentoo box which is in DMZ.
I haven't synced portage on that box for more that 400 days (emerge is getting a little crazy about it),
and I am aware that deep upgrade will be very tough *sigh*.

What I would like to expect is more backward compatibility of newst packages with the older ones,
to prevent rebuilding of whole box which causes blocks many times and time consumpting manual dependency resolution.

Moreover sometimes introduction of new use flags to well known packages is sometimes surprising,
and becomes time consumpting process when the usage have to be once again rethinked taking into account current build specification.

ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

From what I have been seeing and my own testing, you may want to look at the Manjaro Distro, it's a rolling bin-dist. So it is similar to Gentoo in that they don't do releases every so often, but it also doesn't have the issue like Gentoo in that it doesn't have any complaints if you don't update too frequently.

Don't get me wrong, I love Gentooo, and that won't be changing on my main machine (at least till sysd is forced on us, then I may be switching to bsd). However, when I was considering on getting an laptop, I had to look at a different distro that I can use. I knew once I get a laptop, I won't have the time to keep it up to date as regularly as I do on my desktop. That was my major focus, I also did not want to have a compile based distro on a laptop again, just to burn the laptop out (done it a couple times); and no I don't ever use distcc ever.

My experiences from my testing of Majaro:
It defaults to using systemd, but it does allow you to switch away to openrc/eudev.
From what I've seen, the distro does keep in step with gentoo (unstable branch, and in a few cases ahead) on package versions.
It does not give you much flexibility on configuring packages (expected with a bin-distro).
The update manager does support connecting to arch's repo, but setting up the system to use them is a pain (the compile toolchain is not pre-installed).
The update managers only connect to gnome-keyring to manage authentication, which is a pain to setup if you don't use gnome.

hasufell · Retired Dev Joined: 29 Oct 2011 Posts: 429

Tony0945 · Posted: Sat Jun 27, 2015 10:52 pm Post subject:

AchiileTalon said:

ian.au · Guru Joined: 07 Apr 2011 Posts: 591 Location: Australia

Well the proposition in the title is correct under most use cases

My first gentoo box (which I was totally unable to update without breaking) ran a SAMBA Win logon domain and filesharing on our internal network from 2003-6 without an update simply because despite finally getting it working properly; my understanding of what I'd done and how was so sadly deficient that I was terrified to touch it again.

It's a testament to the robustness of a separate /home partition that the datafiles from that original drive are still securely available deep in the fs of my current machine.

Fast forward to now all my machines are linux, mostly gentoo some Debian / Raspbian depending what they're doing.

Desktops I update weekly / fortnightly at most. I always run the first update with the -pv switch first and quickly skim the kernel and portage sections of the forums if it looks like anything contentious is proposed. The updates run overnight and rarely fail. Time investment between gentoo and debian machines much the same. When I want to update/install a single package or set - with a few simple tools understood (equery, eix) portage is unbeatable. I can install it in gentoo before I can even find the package in aptitude

But my experience is all distros need upgrading, not just gentoo. Stable correctly maintained gentoo installs are easily maintained these days, and still so flexible that they are definitely worth the effort.