The Joys of Gentoo
Apparently you are supposed to run the etc-update command regularly to keep your Gentoo Linux system healthy. hmm. This was likely the reason for my udev dying a couple of weeks ago. I must say - I’m less impressed with Gentoo now! Oh well, emerge is still the best package management system I’ve seen so I might just fix my partions and reinstall in 32-bit mode Gentoo Linux this Wednesday at the MITS Install Day.
August 8th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
Gentoo ownz j00 f00l
You should read the Gentoo Linux AMD64 Handbook. This section is about the configuration file protection in emerge:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?full=1#book_part3_chap2__chap3
September 7th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
Actually, I’ve been running gentto for over a year now, and I have never run etc-update. I only update my /etc files as needed and it seems to be just fine.
You can’t possibly expect gentoo to be able to convert all configuration files. That’d be very tricky work as the options of some software can change in very tricky ways. However, most software tries to make sure old config files are good enough and that’s precisely why you don’t need to worry too much about etc-update.
September 8th, 2005 at 9:10 am
Yes I’d agree generally but in practice I have not always found it to be the case. My system was not working properly as a result of udev rules not being updated (because i wasn’t using etc-update). Also, I have noticed some software, such as OpenVPN for example, seems to constantly move around their config files!