Resuming emerge after interruption

[depontius]

So I'm 375 of 1010 packages into "emerge -e world" on my gcc-7.3 upgrade. I know, I don't have to rebuild everything, but I like having the Spectre fixes. Normally I don't mind letting the computers sit around and rebuild themselves, and it's not that much electricity.

In this case, my wife has been having problems, I believe related to xfce, (more later) and I'm thinking of moving her to something lighter weight. I use icewm, but she needs some sort of toolbar, and I'm thinking about "plank", which doesn't look like it drags in a painful amount of stuff. I'd like to install it for her sooner than waiting for another 600+ packages to build, but I also don't want to start from scratch.

Whenever a package build fails, I can run "emerge --restart" or "emerge --skipfirst --restart" and pick up from where I left off if I've fixed the problem, or skip that package and continue if I want to fix the problem later. However if I emerge anything (like new desktop stuff for my wife) in the meantime, I can't resume the "emerge -e @world" later.

IsThere a way to save the portage state off to the side when I interrupt the "emerge -e @world", then emerge stuff for my wife, then put the portage state back and resume the @world emerge?

FYI, the problem looks like (paraphrased) "Maximum X Clients reached, cannot create new window." So basically, it's hit or miss whether she'll be able to start anything other than her email. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - it's a race condition. It seems to me that xfce started as a lightweight desktop, and has been getting heavier and more finicky for the past few years. I can probably do more debug, but for the moment I want to get her working.

I'm also open to dock / button-bar suggestions. I've looked at "xdock", but it doesn't seem to have much with it and seems quite stale. Too many dock-type programs are desktop-based and drag something like Gnome or KDE along with them.

Thanks for suggestions or information.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[bunder]

not that i know of, emerge --resume only works if you don't run another emerge in the meantime.
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[fedeliallalinea]

See also this mv's command
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Questions are guaranteed in life; Answers aren't.

[Yamakuzure]

If you think you can fix the issue manually, you can always continue the failed merge with: