I haven’t needed to reinstall my system nearly as many times as Jon or Tyler, which is a good thing – Linux is supposed to be reasonably stable once it’s up and running, right? My first reinstall of Gentoo was based on a circular dependency with portage, but left me with a stable system that was running GNOME until I tried emerging world. (This is the Gentoo equivalent of “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade”.)
This morning’s fiasco involved the system still thinking that QT3 was installed, even though I’d specifically removed the “kde” flag from my make.conf file. After repeatedly trying to unmerge and purge the unwanted KDE packages from my system, I ran “revdep-rebuild” (suggested on bugs.gentoo.org for the particular OGG library that was refusing to compile) which threw all the KDE packages back in place – and worse, suggested a dependency on GNOME!
There are too many issues that can occur when your system won’t update. I have a client’s Windows machine rebuilding because FakeXPA and “Windows Antivirus Pro” snuck past Symantec AntiVirus – and with new remote exploits coming out all the time, I don’t need my SSH server compromised by a script kiddie.
As a result, I’m currently installing a variant of Gentoo called Funtoo Linux, which uses the same portage package management system but differs in its use of source control, initialization scripts and core overlays. It uses the Gentoo LiveCD to install, and appears to have a more liberal approach as to which packages are available at any point in time. I also agree with Daniel Robbins’ approach to blockers and blocked packages, which has been hashed out on the Gentoo bug tracker in great detail. Wish me luck!
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