Your experiences with "emerge -u world"

mvo

I'm wondering, if a world update is really save. Normally I only update single packages I need, so a world update will update nearly everything.

First (and last) time doing a system update, the glibc ebuild was broken, so I'm a little bit shaky about that ;-)

.

quadbox · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 9:12 am Post subject:

I do it regularly, without too major issues...

However, I always do a '#emerge -p -u world' before hand, and check the output rather carefully:)

I have once had it break glibc. I can well understand you being shaky:).

kipper · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Apr 2002 Posts: 112

I always do
#emerge -p -u world and then emerge individual packages. Haven't had any problems in quite some time.

cheers,
kippper

Jesse · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Apr 2002 Posts: 148

I've had both minor and major problems.
The major ones had to do with new libraries and such while the minor problems have ranged from ebuilds not working, to world 'upgrading' to older packages, to the occasional ebuild that decides to pull in gnome and friends just because it feels like it.
I always do -p before hand...

Also, something that can be annoying is ebuilds that require manual downloads like sun-jdk. Currently this update appears in the _middle_ of my update world list. This means that all attemts at automating the emerge -pu world command is moot because the _entire_ process will stop when it gets to this update. Maybe if these such ebuild were always placed last, barring no other dependency issues, would help solve the problem somewhat.

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 4:16 pm Post subject: Avoid it like the plague

For the last three months I've taken the approach of running emerge with -pu just like everybody above, but then I manually install some of the packages that are listed, and leave the rest alone.

Trouble is, friday I let it install qt-3.0.5 and libogg-1.0 and libvorbis-1.0 (which I had avoided due to the BC incompatibility of the style plugin API). I figured I'd just re emerge kdelibs to get styles working again (I like light3). So QT emerged fine, and so did kdelibs. But no styles. So I tried re-emerging more of KDE 3.0.2, but then I ran across the various compile errors for ogg & vorbis 1.0 as well as some qt compile errors. Fortunately, the system still ran.

But, not well. KMail crashed when I hit "respond" to any email. Konq would freeze, and in general things were "nasty". So I fully unmerged qt & kde, all versions, masked qt-3.05 and libogg-1.0 and libvorbis-1.0; and then emerged kde fresh.

The compile was done when I woke up this morning; I ran a quick test, and all was well. A wasted weekend, however, when I could have been coding.

It occurs to me, however, that this isn't the fault of portage at all. It's the fault of a somewhat too-bleeding-edge package policy.

delta407 · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 4:51 pm Post subject:

I once had an emerge -u world break the entirety of Python. I figured out what broke, fixed it, filed a bug, and prevented others from getting screwed as well. It was fixed within about 20 hours.

Of course, stuff can break anyway... sigh...
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niyogi · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 4:58 pm Post subject:

I've got control-center 1.4 installed (on purpose). But when i update pretend world the system, it assumes that i want to upgrade all the gnome libraries to 2.0. So that's not cool

-S

mvo · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 5:14 pm Post subject: Re: Avoid it like the plague

mvo · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 5:40 pm Post subject:

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 8:49 pm Post subject: Re: Avoid it like the plague

mvo · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 9:12 pm Post subject: Re: Avoid it like the plague

Scott Frappier · n00b Joined: 08 May 2002 Posts: 57

TomorrowPlusX said:

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 4:55 am Post subject: Hey, cool down there brother ;)

I only said "a little too bleeding edge"; I didn't criticize, I didn't say mean things. If I didn't like the gentoo way, I wouldn't use it. Coming from slack, I like having a nice, efficient and friendly source based system. But mainly, I stay for the init system. It's the best I've ever seen. You can't beat:

niyogi · Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 4:55 am Post subject:

using USE="-gnome2" did not have any effect in it suppressing gnome 2.0 stuff from showing up in the pretend list

Scott Frappier · n00b Joined: 08 May 2002 Posts: 57

TommorrowPlusX Said:

mvo · Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 6:04 am Post subject:

ph317 · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2002 Posts: 43

emerge -u world works great for me. Almost every evening when I get home from work, I do "emerge rsync; emerge -pu world", check it over for anything glaringly bad, and then proceed with "emerge -u world". I'm essentially running the latest daily snapshot of Gentoo every day. I have had a few issues though:

1) "Takebacks" - I "emerge rsync" one day, and a new rev of gcc is available (say -r6), so I do the emerge update and rebuild gcc. Then the next day, I do my same "emerge rsync", and -r6 gets masked, and emerge -pu world wants to downgrade me back to -r5. IMHO, if you're gonna release an ebuild and unmask it, don't do it and take it right back - be more sure of the decision. This has happened to me many times, especially with gcc and mozilla - and once just recently with baselayout (1.8.0 takeback). Leaves you stuck with the choice of undoing your recent update (which in all likelyhood will just be re-unmasked in a few days), or having to selectively avoid "updating" it back to the old rev, or editing the package.mask and unmasking it until it gets really unmasked.

2) "Stealth bugfixes" - I have noticed many times that released ebuilds (even ones that aren't masked) sometimes get stealth updated without a version bump. This worries me. If I install foobar-1.4-r3, and a couple weeks later "emerge rsync" brings down an updated copy of "foobar-1.4-r3", "emerge -u foobar" will not update, as I'm already on the correct version. If there was any real fix to the ebuild, I don't get the benefit. IMHO, once an ebuild is released, consider it unchangeable. If you need to fix a bug in an existing ebuild, release a new revision so that everyone gets the benefits of the update.

*edit* a typo in item 2 made it make no sense at all *

earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

To be honest, I HATE emerge -u world. Don't get me wrong. Its not portage that's at fault, its the fact that as the number of ebuilds that you need to update goes up, the probability of one of those ebuilds not working approaches 100%. When one ebuild fails the process stops dead in its tracks. Granted, I can emerge rsync later on to download an updated possibly fixed version of the bad ebuild but users have no control over when and what ebuilds get fixed. Well... except for bugzilla, but thats sort of like trying to control the direction of a car by screeming at the driver from inside the trunk. I'd like to see a command like emerge --update --stable world sort of like how there is a gentoo-sources and a vanilla-sources for the kernel, but while I'm wishing I'd like a dodge viper and Tyra Banks ;-)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I kind of operate under the theory "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
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earlclick · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 34

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? :wink:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

phong · Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 7:07 pm Post subject:

One thing that has been a "gotcha" for me is the way it does/doesn't update dependancies. For example, I've got openssh running on my box. Recently, the openssl library was updated to fix a security hole. It didn't show up if I did a emerge -pu world. All I had to do was emerge openssl to get the latest version of the library then emerge openssh again to use the new fixed library. It went fine, but I would have never known about the openssl update, emerge would not have told me (until openssh gets its own update in the future, which will let me know of updates to any of its dependancies). Not only that, but if there's something else on my system that I'm forgetting about that uses that library, it's out of date.

neuron · Advocate Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 2371

been running gcc3 since the first day 1.3a was released, never had a problem with it, and that DOES break sometimes, still, sandbox rocks (didn't work with 1.3 in the beginning, does now, but it still didn't break anything

).

mvo · Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 8:20 am Post subject:

TGL · Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 10:22 am Post subject:

What I don't like with the "world" update is that it updates things I don't care. Yes, I can also do it by hand, update only packages I do care, but I don't have time for that. So here is what I would like to be able to do: