juantxorena wrote:why don't try to contact a developer to talk about this? Maybe the script can become an official part of Gentoo in the future.
While this may be an option for the future, I want to see much more testing before I will actually consider doing this.
While the script itself has not changed since this thread has been started, the accompanying guide serveral times has.
As more and more users were testing my guide, a couple of them have also suggested various improvements, which in turn led to several revisions of the guide to take those improvements into account.
I want this to get on for some time before I eventually might dare to contact any Gentoo developers.
juantxorena wrote:Have you contact any developer? What he/they say about this?
I am not related to the Gentoo project in any way except for my commitment to the project. I'm just a normal user like most here in the forums.
juantxorena wrote:Messing with the system like this is a dangerous thing,
Yes it is. That's also why I consider more testing to be essential.
Although it seems the guide actually worked fine with the people posting here, that says nothing about how well it will work in unusual cases of system configurations.
juantxorena wrote:I don't want to break anything.
I can understand this.
But there is actually little reason to be afraid of: The script is actually a wrapper around a set of emerge statements, each one emerging another package. The script will not try to interfere with the internals of Portage and won't in fact do anything you were not also able to do manually.
The worst thing that could happen to your system is that the script stops before being finished due to a build error of some package.
If that happens, simply skip that package and let my script continue. Then, after all else has been rebuild, re-emerge the failing package again, hoping the emerge will then work better.
And if it turns out that my script can't continue, because that failing script is an essential dependency for other important packages, you can still revert to the usual
Code: Select all
emerge -e system && emerge -e world
emerge -e system && emerge -e world
emerge -e system && emerge -e world
emerge -e system && emerge -e world
emerge -e system && emerge -e world
emerge -e system && emerge -e world
which some people consider to be a better solution. (I doubt it will, but I could be wrong. The only difference one will see for sure, is when looking at the next electricity bill.)
And if that standard method considered "safe" by most will also fail, you still have the last-resort option of doing a complete stage1 system reinstall, just as badpenguin suggests in his guide.
So - no matter whether my guide actually works for you or not, it will never damage your system to a degree that would not allow you to revert to any of the other guides around.
Such a case has not been reported so far, though.
juantxorena wrote:the way you explain things, I think that you are acting like a televangelist or an infomercial vendor
Since when do televangelists or infomercial vendors
explain anything?
They usually want you to
believe something, which is definitively
not my intention. If it were, I would only post my guide, but not any accompanying guides where I explain the ideas and concepts which eventually led to the creation of my guide.
So, if you felt like listening to an televangelists when reading my guide, I have to apologize: This has not been my intention in any way.
Also, as I am not a native English speaker, I will certainly not always be able to express my thoughts in the same natural way a native speaker would be able to do it in the same situation.
In other words: Please excuse my rather bad English!
juantxorena wrote:This undermines you credibility.
To be honest: Being still a Linux newbie, I do not have any credibility yet. So there is hardly anything to be undermined.
So I'm doing the best I can to read man pages, HOWTOs, source files, etc and figure out how to do things in the most optimal way.
And when I find a solution to a problem that finally pleases me, but is different from the solutions I have found being suggested by others so far, I will share it with the community by posting an article.
Of course this will be done in the hope it may also be useful for others.
But the other reason is that is allows others to comment on and suggest improvements, which has shown to be a quite effective way for improving the quality of any guide.
juantxorena wrote:It is in fact UNNECESSARY to recompile any package bla bla bla" or other similar quotes is not the best idea.
Well, perhaps you are right. It may not have been the most polite way to put that statement.
But it truly reflects my personal opinion about the issue, so it's at least not a lie.
Also, except for unusual scenarios where the usual "emerge -e system && emerge -e world" would fail as well, there have not been any serious problems reported with the most current version of my guide so far. (Which does not mean there were no problems reported with older versions of the guide. But I updated the guide in such cases in order to fix it.)
But up to date, my guide is still the fastest way to rebuild an entire system (assuming users have been updating their systems on a regular basis even before considering using my script; my guide will exploit this).
There are
known situations in which it will not work, such as updating glibc from version 2.x to 3.x. But I won't expect such a major glibc update to happen within the current decade.
Also, in such a situation, all the other guides based on "emerge -e world" will also fail. You
have to do a complete stage1 reinstall in such cases.
But otherwise, the guide seems just to work.
juantxorena wrote:Personally I would wait to see what devs think about this.
I assume the Gentoo devs have more serious things on their do-to-lists than caring about such minor issues.
After all, my script is a mere optimization. It is nothing new or revolutionary on its own, it will only save you some bucks on your next electricity bill. That's all.
. I have an issue though which I resolved in two ways. I am not sure the first solution hasn't spoiled my system, though.
