emerge --update, problems

[kansas]

Hello

I am a happy user of gentoo system. I have been using version 2005.1 for a long time, without update. But I am also interested in web development, so I decided to update my php version. I have both php4 and php5 as cgi scripts, everything worked fine.
Somewhere I read about update so, I typed emerge --update =dev-lang/php-4*, and list of packages was quite big (about 15 positions) - lot of core apps i think. After emerge sync I tried to emerge portage, but access violation summary error don't let me to do it. Probably that was my fault, that I try to emerge php without updating portage. I have emerged 3, or 4 apps but the same error came - access violation summary. I searched forums and found solution - I should emerge it with flag FEATURES="-sandbox", so I did it in that way. Portage emerged fine, but during php emerging (package called, I don't remeber but short name with 'db' and lot of numbers inside) error called and emerge stopped.
I tried to emerge typing emerge =dev-lang/php-4*. Emerge was succesfull, but in my apache log there is: Premature end of script headers: php-cgi
when i try to simply call phpinfo() inside my script. None of my php apps works . Typing php info in command line with php -r 'phpinfo();' is ok - everything works.
I was trying to install php as a module, but when I emerge apache I get the following error:

[jesnow]

Try adding --deep.

If you haven't been using --update and your profile is 2005.1, then your system is probably way out of date. You need to switch to a newer profile and run 'emerge --update world', but don't do it all at once. At least try 'emerge -DNua world', probably you'll get dozens of packages to update, but if there are no blocks or masks, then you should end up with a functioning (and up to date) system when it's over.

Never '--update'ing your system in gentoo eventually leads to trouble. Once a year is not enough. I find that more than 2-3 weeks between updates is too much, becuase little glitches tend to pile up and interfere with each other, that is, the error messages from one confuse the error messages from the other.

I wish someone would write a "weekly housekeeping guide" to using emerge -DNua world, revdep-rebuild, building the latest kernel and eliminateing builtup cruft to keep a system up to date. There are many different strategies, of course to keeping an up to date system, but at least a guide that works would be useful to a lot of beginners.

Cheers,

Jon.