portage hosed my system, THANKS Gentoo!

csb · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2006 Posts: 5

Maybe somebody in the gentoo community who gives a damn, will care enough to raise a red flag on this whole "portage" junk.

I've been using gentoo for a while now... my current system has been up for about a year and half... until tonight.

So, I apparently slacked off a bit and haven't updated my system in a while. No big deal (or so I thought) ... emerge --sync, then emerge --update world --pretend ... ok, WTF. Got a bunch of blocked packages... turns out to be the whole "lets fuck up X11" upgrade that nobody sent me the memo on.

So, I follow the directions and proceed to destroy my X11 system. Great. Let's call this "detour #1".

After Detour #1, X wouldn't run. Bunch of broken shit involved, so I figured, what the heck... I'll just continue updating my system figuring that the 175 outdated packages were probably contributing to the whole "X is borked" problem.

Well, emerge --update world failed for a second time... on this one, it bitched about the nvidia-glx not being available any longer.

Ok, back to the documentation... I then found out that I had to unmerge nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel, then emerge nvidia-drivers. Great, lets call this "detour #2".

Then, back to theh emerge --update world ... had to resolve a few more blocked packages for whatever unknown reason. After that, the update appeared to be going well... for a little while. Then, portage decided to merge gcc 4.1.1 (up from 3.4.6) ... after which, it then failed to compile glibc.

Well great... back to the documentation. Apparently, there's some other stuff that has to be done in order to upgrade to gcc 4.1.1 ... but hell, that didn't stop portage from merging it anyway!!

... and that's the end of the sytem. My installation of Gentoo, is now officially fucked. THANKS PORTAGE! (boots sortof, no networking, can't login, dead in the water)

SO REALLY. MAYBE I HAVE A POORLY CONCEIVED NOTION OF WHAT PORTAGE IS SUPPOSED TO DO, but I'm going to ask the following questions from the standpoint of USER FRIENDLINESS and USEABILITY and FUNCTIONALITY.

1. If a major change in the distro occurs, (such as the switch to modular X), why does portage just throw a bunch of error messages instead of actually conducting the update???

2. Same for the nvidia-glx to nvidia-drivers switch... why doesn't portage just preform the appropriate update?

3. WHY, WHY on earth does portage willingly break an entire system by upgrading GCC, then failing to complete the process DURING an emerge --update world????

4. Why are there detours?? Why does portage die in the middle of an update, without much of a clue about *why*, leaving me on my own to go research the problem, only to discover that there is some sort of manual upgrade I have to conduct?? (such as the X11 switch, the GCC upgrade, etc.) ... makes absolutely no sense in my mind.

5. Is it possible that anyone in gentoo land can get over the command line portage love fest?? How about this ingenious idea: There should be an update button. User clicks it. System updates. Progress bar. Done. OR, is that not complicated enough?

Oddly, I've been a good advocate for gentoo over the past few years. But that all changed tonight. To be at least fair, I'll say that I've never been quite fond of portage. Seems as though it's an over engineered solution to a simple problem. BUT, for destroying my system... that takes the prize!

(!gentoo), here I come.

mach.82 · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:26 am Post subject:

If you have been using Gentoo for the past year and a half and this is your very first posting, where were you in the past year and a half? Gentoo is a committee whereby we help each other and whereby thing changes real fast! Many of the decisions (for better or worse) are made because Linux the OS itself is also a moving target. I ran into the same problem upgrading but if the system is too old, I simply format the drive and start over.

Headrush · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:32 am Post subject:

Too bad about your system, but this could be fixed without a lot of trouble still, too bad you left.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:36 am Post subject:

Since he had to create a new forum logon to post this, it probably means he hasn't bothered with reading either the forums or the GWN in many months. If he had, he would not have been caught by surprise.
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mark_alec · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 8:15 am Post subject:

Moved from Portage & Programming to Gentoo Chat.
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rambam

AllenJB · Veteran Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 1285

You missed some important steps in your update process, especially when updating such an "old" install. Namely, you should check both the forums and the GWN newsletters - these are important communication tools that the community uses for passing on information like "you need to be careful when updating because...".

Alternatively, you could have just posted a message asking "I haven't updated my system in <timespan> - are there any important updates that I should be aware of?" (or asked on irc).

Gentoo isn't a "push button - works by magic" system. Gentoo, in my opinion, is a high maintainance distro designed for control freaks who like to know exactly what's going on in their system. This is why portage doesn't automagically switch packages or automagically perform a gcc update (beyond the fact that coding a successful automagic gcc update would be an absolutely horrible task considering it includes re-emerging system, then world). Additionally, when people update their gcc package they don't always want to use it as their primary compiler - this is part of Gentoo's system of choice and giving the user ultimate control.

jstead1 · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 9:36 am Post subject:

runningwithscissors · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 11:09 am Post subject:

This sounds suspiciously like a troll post. It includes all the packages that people have had trouble updating over the past year or so. And any gentoo user is well aware of the ardurous procedure of upgrading the toolchain and the caution that needs to be taken before attempting it.

Either the OP is just trying to create trouble or hasn't touched his install in over a year, in which case, non-trivial updates are going to be hairy, especially in a source based distribution. :roll:

Headrush · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 3:02 pm Post subject:

wah · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 4:02 pm Post subject:

csb · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2006 Posts: 5

runningwithscissors · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 4:29 pm Post subject:

sonicbhoc · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 4:34 pm Post subject:

Headrush · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:05 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20090

How is it that so many people managed to upgrade without problems, yet you have a problem, and that makes portage junk? (nobody has claimed portage is perfect and doesn't need improvement)

YOU hosed your system. I understand venting from frustration, thats fine. If you'd like to fix your problem, do so in an appropriate thread asking for help.
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wah · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:07 pm Post subject:

csb · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2006 Posts: 5

Headrush · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:21 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20090

yngwin · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:58 pm Post subject:

PEBKAC, but of course most people try to shift the blame. :roll:

Oh, and I hope you have fun with Ubuntu! :wink:

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tabanus · l33t Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 638 Location: UK

You're obviously very frustrated, and I've been there before. Screw frikkin Gentoo, I've had it. Lord knows there's millions of posts here with that sentiment. But what it boils down to is a lack of understanding of portage, the emerge command, and all the intricacies of the system, essentially as someone's already said, a PEBKAC (or RTFM) problem. At the risk of repeating a lot of what's already been said:-

warrens

Gergan Penkov

Janne Pikkarainen · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 8:12 pm Post subject:

I see lots of this kind of ranting and rarely those ranters offer any kind of solution to these problems.

True - administering Gentoo can be a bit turbulent at times.

True - recompiling your system can take a lot of time.

True - hickups does happen.

BUT look around! Get away from Gentoo for a while - I don't mean you should format your current installation, but instead try out other distributions on some spare HD / computer / virtual machine / whatever. Instead of "WOW this works OMG my Gentoo does not" reactions inspect that <insert here the name of some whizz-bang distro> underneath.

You'll probably find it's using GCC 4.x, modular X.org, the latest desktop environments, hal/dbus/ivman, all that stuff.

Now consider you've been using your beloved Gentoo for - let's say - two years without updating it much. You didn't update because you were scared of breaking something or perhaps you just didn't have a good Internet connection to play with. Then you suddenly got that chance to update your Gentoo and basically everything had changed in the mean time.

Is that Gentoo's fault? I don't think so. The Linux world has changed a lot and in my opinion this has been very busy year in the terms of software updates - PHP, Java, MySQL, gcc, glibc, you name it... they all have received some major updates. Should Gentoo have missed them and lagged behind? No. Major updates tend to break things - sometimes badly, sometimes more gently, but they break things. Stuff happens.

Instead of ranting I congratulate the Gentoo community. This distribution allows me to continue using my couple of years old installation without doing a complete upgrade to some newer version of the distro. I can update it bit by bit. And it keeps working! It's a miracle itself. Some of you might think things like gcc 3.x -> 4.x upgrade and then recompiling everything as a reinstallation, but I don't. My installed software and custom settings will stay there and I don't need to do a fresh install, or most of the time even bring the server down.

So in a nutshell: errors happen, buggy ebuilds are there, QA could need some work, but in overall I still think Gentoo is a very nice Linux distribution. Binary distros has their own advantages, but for me things like USE flags are something I'm not gonna leave behind just because of some rare oddities.
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