oops i broke emerge

[allucid]

just a little while ago i copied a script over bash when i was in a hurry...now i borked emerge. i really need to quit breaking stuff. anyhoo, i was doing an emerge -u system to (intentionally) downgrade a number of masked packages I have been using and it errored out with this:

[guero61]

That hurts!

The only ways I've been able to recover from such an error were:
1. Download latest Stage-3 tarball, unpack in root directory. Run "emerge -e world". It'll take forever, but everything'll be recompiled to it's original status. Of course, you could leave off the emerge, but the packages that were untarred won't be optimized for your system.

2. Reinstall.

I think you know which I recommend.

[allucid]

worked like a charm.

except i forgot to backup my configs...
man, this just isn't my week.

[allucid]

almost. well it seems there are more problems than i thought.... may have to reinstall afterall.

[guero61]

I guess it could have overwritten certain configs, I just didn't foresee that. Sorry!

What other issues are there? Maybe something we can help with?

[StuBear]

This is too late now as you have already untared the stage3, but in /usr/portage/sys-admin/portage/files there is a rescue portage that can be used to recover from this type of accident.

Read README.rescue (I think, but if it's wrong the correct one will be very obvious) in the portage/files directory.

A lot less painful than killing all your config settings with the tarball.

[guero61]

See, even "guru" members don't necessarily know everything, even though we would like to think we do!

[allucid]

The config files aren't that big of a deal, some other packages are broken though and re-emerging them always fails. I just may start over. I don't mind that much anyway, it's generally a painless procedure. It's good to know about that rescue portage incase I get in this sort of mess again.

[pjp]

Moved from Other Things Gentoo.
_________________
Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[allucid]

one more question...

since i built my system from stage one before it wouldn't do any good to do that again, right? i'm not sure what the bootstrapping process does...

can anyone shed some light on this?

[guero61]

I don't think so; untarring the stage-3 overwrites some of the more important system files.

The only thing that's not going to be absolutely perfect if you do a stage3 is that for the time being, your system is not completely optimized. As each package updates in portage, the new one will be re-compiled with your specific USE and CFLAGS variables. That's the only drawback; for some it's enough to withdraw to stage1. You'll have to be patient one way or another -- wait for an initial compile or wait for packages to update so you can compile the update.

[StuBear]

if you are worried about glibc, gcc etc not being "optimized" to your liking, then you can re-bootstrap, but it really isn't necessary.

What you may want to do is run "regenworld", as your old world file has probably been blitzed by the stage3 tarball. If you are lucky the records in the portage db will contain your old files and "regenworld" will put them back into your world file.

If you want to reoptimize then a sligthly faster method than bootstraping would be to "emerge -e world", this will rebuild everything except glibc to your settings in /etc/make.conf

My suggestion however would be to remerge only those apps that you feel MUST be optimized, and leave the rest until they get updated - which will probably be some time next week the way gentoo gets updated

[StuBear]