Nowadays, I upgraded my gentoo linux.
I have not synchronoused the portage tree for nearly half of the year. When I came with upgrading my system, I got stuck with a lot of things I’ve never thought.
Luckily enough, gentoo use a mechanism to incremental upgrade. So I spent days to completely upgrade the system just with the system working properly.
This is a simple notes. I can’t really remember the details.
I’ll just write down what I learned from this lesson. To more smoothly upgrade the system the next time.
Upgrade The Stable
Upgrade it
First, syncing the portage tree.
emerge-websync
Select a good source, if you encounter with something wrong just remove the portage tree in /usr/portage/.
NEVER NEVER FORGET TO READ THE NEWS
eselect news list
Then, emerge the world. You can edit /usr/portage/world to select what you really want. I’ve play a lot of things I may never explore later, so I just edit it to minimize the time for upgrading.
We can emerge world now. And, preparing for struggling for hours or days…Always use --with-bdeps=y.
emerge --update --deep --with-bdeps=y @world
As a alternative, emerge system first.
emerge --update --deep --with-bdeps=y system
Always, there exists tons of conflicts and some other problems like licenses and so on.
As far as I know, one have to solve them step by step.
Problems
There may three major problems:
Dependency Conflict
Check if you have emerge softwares are not included in the stable portage tree. Remove it like this:
emerge --depclean google-chrome
Check if you’ve masked some software. Remove them…
Re-emerge.
Build or Configure Error
Just search via google. You may re-emerge something portage won’t handle properly.
Sometimes, this is because you have to rebuild Perl modules.
perl-cleaner --all -- --exclude=perl-core/Module-CoreList
New XXX Need to be Changed to Proceed
Use --auto-unmask-write if you know what you are doing.
then:
dispatch-conf
or:
etc-update
Post Upgrading
You may want to update the overlay too.
layman -S
Yet another emerge world(If you encounter with problems, refer to the notes above):
emerge --update --deep --with-bdeps=y @world
Remove orphaned packages.
emerge --depclean -a
Check obsolete packages:
eix-test-obsolete
Update configure files:
etc-update
Rebuild broken packages:
revdep-rebuild
Update eix databases:
eix-update
If you compile a new kernel(you do not have to), don’t forget to:
emerge @module-rebuild
That’s all, hope this helps.