Procedure for getting toolchain into known good state?

[rac]

There appear to be several users that have manually upgraded GCC, and are experiencing some rather drastic and unfortunate errors as a result of this. GCC segfaults causing make to error 139 seem to be one common manifestation of this problem.

Can anybody describe a procedure that we can recommend to people that will get their compilation toolchain (gcc, binutils, glibc, whatever else is needed) into a known good state, regardless of the current state of affairs? At this point, install afresh into a new chroot is the best idea I can come up with, but I forsee that this advice will not go over very well with people, and I would prefer not to give people overly annoying and burdensome advice when a more palatable alternative exists.

Can some judicious application or modification of carpaski's 1.x -> 1.4 upgrade scripts achieve this goal?
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[ElCondor]

Actually the error 139 problem is definitly not gcc3 related. I still have a gcc 2.95 system and can emerge anything but python, always failing with error 139 at the same point of compilation (as dicussed in Portage behaviour changes and Upgrade to dev-lang/python-2.2.1-r5 fails)

since many packages depend on python to upgrade (postgres, vi, kde,..) this is getting quite annoying.

* ElCondor pasa *
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