gem - "gentoo manager"

[McGruff]

Gem is a little utility primarily designed to manage "bootable backups". The aim is to be able to recover quickly from an emerge which renders your system unusable in some way. If the cost of failure is low, you're free to experiment with new software and updates.

Gem works by copying /boot and / onto "mirror" partitions. When you run into a software problem, a quick fiddle with grub and a reboot will get you up and running again from the backup in a couple of minutes. You can continue with your work and fix the broken system at leisure with chroot.

Basic usage is:

$ gem sync (copies the current OS, apps and /boot to the backup partitions)
$ gem revert (switch to the backups)
$ gem switch (switch back to the other system - in practice this is just an alias of revert)

See $ gem help for more.

The bootable backups are intended to contain software & configuration only. Data should have its own backup strategy and ideally large data folders will be mounted on discrete partitions. However, gem doesn't enforce this separation and will happily copy anything you tell it to.

Gem does assume that /boot and / are mounted on separate partitions.

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INSTALLATION

You'll need to create a portage overlay. Open /etc/make.conf and add this line:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/opt/underlay"

If you use layman, add the above line before you source layman.

Now run the following commands as root from a terminal. Note that this refers to version 0.1. You'll need to change that to get a later version, when they become available. You can copy-paste this into a bash script if you like:

[avx]

Would you please provide me with a situation, where this would be useful? I can't quite see, how this would be - much - better, than just using quickpkg?!
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[McGruff]

Before doing an emerge, or building a new kernel, you would use gem to backup OS & apps. Now, if something gets broken, you can quickly revert to the last working system. If you've got work to do, you can put the emerge problems to one side and deal with them when you have some free time. You're guaranteed never to have any downtime no matter how badly your system is broken.

That's not bad

[Rion]

ruby package manager? O_o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyGems
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rion-overlay

[McGruff]

Thanks didn't know that.

As far as I know, "gem" is a free package name but I guess I'll need to change the terminal command name. Maybe "gm" will be OK. Will need to look into that.

[ppurka]

What does it use? demerge?
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emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using kde5 | e is unstable :-/

[McGruff]

Bash scripts and rsync.

I hadn't heard of demerge until now... Will need to look into that.

A couple of things spring to mind though. Demerge couldn't help if the system was completely unbootable. Also, it's good to have a separate copy to fiddle with in a chroot if the problem is hard to track down and might take a while.

For example, I recently couldn't startx after an emerge -uND world. I switched to the backup disks, and got on with all my day-to-day stuff as normal. When I had some spare time, I mucked about with the broken OS in a chroot and eventually got it sorted out after a few days.

[dE_logics]

This should be made official.
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My blog

[McGruff]

I'd really like to see this, or something like it, added to portage. It's incredibly convenient to be able to switch between two working OS's when something goes wrong.

$ emerge -auND world

.....something important is broken

$ emerge --switch

...up and running again after booting into the other working OS

I'll post the latest ebuild soon. I've added in a couple of extra features including a command to build a new kernel.