Portage, mips(64el), and old EAPI (5)

[manphiz]

Hi,

So I've been trying to figure out a way to upgrade the old 2014 stage 4 gentoo system on my Loongson box. I can do "emerge-webrsync". And then I realized that the profile for mips systems only support EAPI 5[1]. However all essential packages like GCC, binutils, etc. requires EAPI 7+. Does that mean it's impossible to use the current portage on such old systems from official portage point of view?

My current portage version:

Code: Select all

gentoo@yeeloong ~ $ emerge --version
Portage 2.2.10 (default/linux/mips/17.0/mipsel/multilib/n32, gcc-4.8.3, glibc-2.17, 3.12.22 mips64)

So then I tried to upgrade portage and was hit by these:

Code: Select all

gentoo@yeeloong ~ $ emerge --pretend --verbose --nodeps sys-apps/portage

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:


!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "sys-apps/portage" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- sys-apps/portage-9999::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)
- sys-apps/portage-3.0.30-r1::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)
- sys-apps/portage-3.0.29::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)
- sys-apps/portage-3.0.28-r1::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)
- sys-apps/portage-3.0.20-r6::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)
- sys-apps/portage-3.0.18::gentoo (masked by: EAPI 7)

The current version of portage supports EAPI '5'. You must upgrade to a
newer version of portage before EAPI masked packages can be installed.
For more information, see the MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge
man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.


 * IMPORTANT: 9 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
 * Use eselect news to read news items.

I tried to manually change the EAPI to 7, but then my old portage claims this is not supported. So I'm stuck. Also this EAPI situation seems to suggest that mips is no longer officially supported by portage?

[1] http://ftp.dei.uc.pt/pub/linux/gentoo/p ... l/n32/eapi

[eccerr0r]

You'll need to use a new version of portage. This might mean you need to step through multiple older snapshots of the portage tree if you can't upgrade portage.

Will be an ugly upgrade I think...

[NeddySeagoon]

manphiz,

Its not impossible, just slow and difficult.

There are two approaches.
Get a new portage and its supporting packages and install them as binaries outside of the filesystem areas controlled by the installed portage.
You call this portage directly with /full/path/to/emerge but other than that, things are fairly normal.
You will got blockers to resolve along the way. because the dependencies specified in todays repo will not be complete going back to 2014.

The other way is to update slowly in say six month to a year steps, so you do the updates that are missing.
That's described in HOWTO Update Old Gentoo

Your 2014 stage3 predates the current git repo, so you will need to go back to the historical git repo to get started.
CVS has gone. the CVS repo was migrated to git before it was shut down, so nothing was lost.

All the ebuilds you will need are around. I have a lot of the sources too. :)
There are also old portage snapshots scattered over the web, in case you don,t want to make your own.
Making your own snapshots is described too.

[manphiz]

You'll need to use a new version of portage. This might mean you need to step through multiple older snapshots of the portage tree if you can't upgrade portage.

Will be an ugly upgrade I think...

Sounds reasoanble. Is there any instructions on syncing to a snapshot of portage and incrementally update @system and @world? I wouldn't mind to do this for every yearly snapshot to catch up

On another thought, this may be a downside of portage that without a periodical stable releases there is no way to upgrade from a very old system. I saw a general suggestion is to restart from a newer stage 3 with a backup of personal data, but for systems without a recent enough stage 3 this is very bad. Any plan for portage to improve on this situation?

[manphiz]

manphiz,

Its not impossible, just slow and difficult.

There are two approaches.
Get a new portage and its supporting packages and install them as binaries outside of the filesystem areas controlled by the installed portage.
You call this portage directly with /full/path/to/emerge but other than that, things are fairly normal.
You will got blockers to resolve along the way. because the dependencies specified in todays repo will not be complete going back to 2014.

The other way is to update slowly in say six month to a year steps, so you do the updates that are missing.
That's described in HOWTO Update Old Gentoo

Your 2014 stage3 predates the current git repo, so you will need to go back to the historical git repo to get started.
CVS has gone. the CVS repo was migrated to git before it was shut down, so nothing was lost.

All the ebuilds you will need are around. I have a lot of the sources too.
There are also old portage snapshots scattered over the web, in case you don,t want to make your own.
Making your own snapshots is described too.

Sounds fun I'll go over the materials and try. Thanks!

[NeddySeagoon]

manphiz,

If you are you are going to do the baby steps cross distcc may help.
There are several drawbacks though.

Only the compile phase is distributed. Preprocessing and linking will still be done on the Loongson.
Its your problem to keep the gcc versions in use in step. They need to be *identical*.
Its a bit of a double edged sword. It helps where it works, when it doesn't you get build fails if you are lucky and run time fails if not.

[manphiz]

manphiz,

If you are you are going to do the baby steps cross distcc may help.
There are several drawbacks though.

Only the compile phase is distributed. Preprocessing and linking will still be done on the Loongson.
Its your problem to keep the gcc versions in use in step. They need to be *identical*.
Its a bit of a double edged sword. It helps where it works, when it doesn't you get build fails if you are lucky and run time fails if not.

I doubt I'll go through setting up a distcc AIUI it should be of the same toolchain setup and I have only one loongson2f box.

On another thought, there may be other easier approaches, like if I can cross bootstrap a current stage 1 for loongson2f from an AMD64 machine, or if I can bootstrap a current stage 1 using this old system on loongson2f it may save quite some time. Is it possible?