How safe is 'emerge system'?

[sp33dy]

I have not done it in a long time...and there is a long, long list of packages to update. I have a few nagging problems, with splashutils and a few other packages that never seem to want to emerge...but nothing serious. It may be nice to have these problems vanish, but I don't want to kill my system either.

Which comes to my question...is doing regular system/world update a wise thing to do? Is it safe, or is there a safe way to do it? Do I need to use conservativel cflag/use flag settings?

Thanks,
sp33dy.
_________________
An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind
-Ghandi

[texas1emt]

Well AFAIK, if you do update your world via 'emerge -Dvu world' it will cover anything 'emerge -u system' would do plus extra.

As far as automatically updating it via some method like cron, I'd recommend against it as much as I can! Sometimes there's packages you won't want to update or some packages might have issues and clash with something else you have installed. I'd recommend updating your world files as much as you like. I sit down and do it manually every 2-3 days (sometimes every day) with 'emerge -Dvup world' and then 'emerge -Dvu world'.

What you can do (and I do it, it's harmless), is put 'emerge -Duf world' in your cron. It will go grab all the tarballs for any updated packages so that when you're ready to install them there's no waiting around for them to download.

As far as your CFLAGS/USE settings, you might want to leave them alone unless you have a package that you would like extra support for something in. For example, if you compiled PHP a long time ago without jpeg or gd, and now you want to have that support in PHP when you update it, stick those use flags in your make conf and the new functionality will be included in PHP (and your other packages) when you update.
_________________
M. Hayden - San Antonio, TX

[mikegpitt]

I'd say proceed cautiously. I was in a similar situation like you a few months ago. I emerged things that I felt were critical, and may break things sepreatly, and then checked to make sure everything updated corectly. The things which appeared not too critical I did automatically in the world update. Everything worked great though. Be careful with the etc-update afterword though.

[i92guboj]

Yep, usually there's no trouble, but that's usually... As posted above, your main thing to worry about is about keeping updated your config files with etc-update, if you do it manually and don't rely so much in etc-update you won't have problems. I would advise you to keep your system updated regularly (once a week, for example), because if you update from time ago you will get lots of config files listed when you run etc-update, and it can be a boring task (anyway there is no other trouble, from my experience).

[sp33dy]

Thanks for the tips, I will take the plunge and update.

sp33dy
_________________
An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind
-Ghandi

[mathfeel]

[mikegpitt]

[mathfeel]