update world: hopes, pains and laughs

[KiTaSuMbA]

I am a rather late-comer on the gentoo bandwagon (1.2 back in june) so it wasn't till now and after the presentation of a fair collection of new releases that I attempted a "massive update."
It was about time to see if gentoo keeps the promises over ease of update without the usual perpetual dep hells.
It took an overnight and with a couple of coughs along the way (if I had slept, I would only find the process aborted at some point). Here is a list:
- updating octave, it requires >= readline 4.2 but for some reason it's not emerged as a dep. The process exits gracefully. I manually ebuild readline 4.2 and then emerge octave... Cool up to now, I give another emerge -u world and things start where they stoped.
- nmap 2.54 beta 36 makes some terrible mess on "access violation logs" (gesus help us what and why is this). I retry manualy, try the docs... nada. Nevermind, for the moment I'll stick to beta33, I'll see to it some other time. The rest compiles peacefuly, no more troubles.
On with checking the new stuff...
- gnome 2 looks nice and fast, the bast4rd kept my settings too... Nautilus runs a lot more smoother than the 1.4 version. Nice! It just earned an entry in my bbox menu I thought.
- gimp 1.3: looks terribly better, some fresh tools & dialogs (e.g. the shaper tool is now separated as scale / shear / perspective and it was high time the guys got the "navigator" idea back from photoshop). But there all ends: some script-fu's that go nice & tidy on gimp 1.2, they just crash with error or even seg fault (at least one) the entire prog. Good thing I kept the gimp 1.2 binary too!!
-dc_gui: the package itself was not updated but I think something went wrong with the libs... It now segfaults. Will try a reinstall and see what happens.
- blackbox: some tricky business messed the right click menu, and the stick option actually corresponds to "kill client." I will look into this some time later but until I realized what was happening I was in a serious WTF situation.
- I finally gave in trying fluxbox (a visit at their site while I was waiting for the entire process persuaded me, especially the tabs): trouble comes fast, as fluxkeys cannot read the ~.fluxbox/keys file (it's there but empty obviously) and quits and fluxconf segfaults. But here come the laughs: porting my bbox menu and adjusting with fluxmenu, fluxconf ran from there succeeds... I give a try to bbkeys and bbrun and work perfectly in the slit. I then grep on the ~.blackbox/Styles/currentstyle for the root command and insert it in the ~.fluxbox/init: my bbox and fluxbox right now can only be distinguished by the cautious eye to notice the "tabs." Heh!

Another funny notice is that when I finished the update world, I rapidly checked for the new gdm and my nice blackbox just to see if nothing critical broke, exiting the bbox session within seconds only to get a gtk-managed "warning" (gdm2 launched it obviously) that I quit within 10 secs and this probably means I got some trouble and check my .xsession-errors... My flatmate overheard me mumbling something about babysitting...

Overall gentoo keeps its promises - mostly
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