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Re: [tlug] Looking for advice on the best way to rebuild a gentoo box



On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:37:57 +0900, Al Hoang <hoanga@example.com> wrote:

I'm not a Gentoo expert by any means although *cough* I presume
there are some folks on TLUG who are. But you might want to keep these
factors in the quest to answer 'upgrade' or 'reinstall'
1. What (green/blue/brown)black belt level of Distro-fu are you at?
2. How much do you value your current system state as is?
3. How much do you want to get rid of old cruft?
4. How many new things that came down the pipeline look like they'll stomp
on what you have now?


If 2 is pretty big on your concern list and 1 is not a problem, it's
probably more tempting to hit 'emerge world'.
If 3 & 4 are concerns perhaps a reinstall with an overlay of what you have
for your current system will be more appropriate

[ Snip awesome formulas for estimating time consumed with the above options ]

I am going to have to use your formulas to better weigh my choices ;-)

	If it was me, I'd catalog all the stuff I installed, backup /etc,
/home, /usr/portage and anything in /usr/local/portage then reinstall
from scratch since the number of system affecting changes in your case
seem a large enough delta that it'd be better to try to install a
new system and figure out which settings you had can be merged back in
properly.  I'm sure other folks will have different opinions on this.
Another reason being that, my experience is that many distros spend
incredible amounts of effort making sure INSTALLS go very well however
upgrades are a very hard problem to get right since upgrades usually
tend to be on a customized configuration to the point each machine is
a little bit unique so the possibility of hitting an unforeseen snag
is high without huge amounts of integration testing or just installing
very plain and boring packages.

This is probably the best idea and the one that in the long run will take the least time. But, maybe I will learn more by hosing my system trying to do it the hard way ;-)

Thanks,
Zev


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