Revive a depclean' ed gentoo system

[Henk Poley]

I've learned the hard way some month ago that using 'emerge depclean' is bad, and now I'd like to revive my system. Things that are unmerged are /bin/ls for example, and other basic stuff, but most is still there. The system won't boot in this state, but I can use Knoppix to fudz around on the partition (it being an epia-800 system, so it won' t boot the Gentoo LiveCD).

[Edit] Following /usr/portage/sys-apps/portage/files/README.RESCUE is not enough, it doesn't contain the files needed in /bin...

If someone needs more info, for example the listing of /bin just ask:

[SerfurJ]

always verify the packages to be removed first. go to https://forums.gentoo.org/ and look up the reverse dependencies for each package if you're not sure what uses them.

try revdep-rebuild to get your system back.

[Henk Poley]

Uhm sorry, but I got that message already (and I'll now use 'dep', and not 'emerge depclean')

I was coming from a Debian system, and didn't expect the package management to just wipe system critical stuff without warning.

Anyways, I fixed it (I think):
- Moved my /etc to /etc.bak
- Got the latest x86 stage3
- untarred to /mnt/hda4 (my gentoo partition on this system), according to the Gentoo handbook.
- moved /etc back
- tried 'emerge sync' from a 'chroot /mnt/hda4' which failed with /dev/null acces errors.

Then I though "what the heck" and tried booting the system. It booted back into XFCE4 under X. I'm now running 'emerge sync' and I'll try to update my system. I don't expect to run into other troubles now.

[Edit] btw, revdep-rebuild won't work on a system without basic GNU utils.