system harshly broken after 'emerge world'

domhowells · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2002 Posts: 11

A few days ago I did:
emerge sync
emerge --fetchonly -U world
emerge -U world

When it finished I tried something like:
emerge -p sodipodi
and I got an error telling me that there was no python on the system. Anyway as I thought it might be a simple problem that needed a reeboot and an etc-update, I did exactly that. When I reboot:
gdm wont start because of a missing gtk lib
xfree wont start manually with fbdev and font path errors
etc-update also bails with no python.
also about half of the rest of the applications that can be run from the command prompt like mplayer, cdrecord etc wont run anymore and the system is unuseable; also unrepairable due to portage's complete brokenness.

I am very disappointed in gentoo for breaking over such a simple issue. The gentoo theory is meant to be install-once upgrade-many yeah? and now im having to re-install after 4 months after something as innocuous as
'emerge world'
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Dom 'Ace' Howells

slartibartfasz · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 10:58 am Post subject:

u should not do blind updates - i suspect that your problems have to do with the new baselayout. if u update one of the most important packages for your system and do not configure it properly, u mustnt wonder that it breaks... no linux system will run if u change important programs in a way that they cannot read /etc anymore...

i do -u world on different machines every day, one of them a development-packages only box - no severe problem with portage so far...
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kodos · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2002 Posts: 20

I'm not sure if your post was simply a gentoo flame or a request for help. If it is the latter, why not start by searching you system for python. Perhaps it's not that is gone, but just that it has move. Just a thought.

kyron · Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2003 7:35 pm Post subject:

I have been with Gentoo for about a year now and am very pleased with it... BUT irony has it that I have had a serious issue with it lately. After performing an emerge world I ended up with a GRUB prompt at boot up, as if grub wasn't set up properly...and this happened on two of my machines. I went through the GRUB installation once again (had to find the documentation for GUB since it had been such a long time since I had done so).

My point is, this GRUB error happened on two independant machine after performing an emerge world...it's not hard to find out that emerge had something to do with this. One rather dangerous flaw with emerge is that it doesn't seem to give you a sommation of the CRITICAL messages sent out by the packages (those messages that fly by when the compile is finished). So I may be the one to "blame" for not having read the fly-by warnings... in any case, I beleive emerge should pack all these warnings into a neat file to be read after a system upgrade...so that they are readable to the human eye.

--- I never got GRUB to work correctly on one of my systems after the upgrade...si I decided to f**k it and install good old lilo....not regretting it at all, less screwing aroung and more reliable/predictable I find.
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