Something that is really annoying. Now I dont know if I am missing something or it is just plain annoying. When you emerge sync and emerge the latest apps for example with baselayout. I found that it does not update you scripts ie: net.eth* or /etc/conf.d/rc as it would do so if you were installing it afresh. Now this is bastardly annoying. It kind of defeats the purpose of doing a emerge sync and keeping your system up to date

Am I doing something wrong or what?

It would seem I missed the lesson on etc-update and dispatch-conf. FFS! I really feel like fdisking gentoo off my pc.

Ravilj, you wanna tell me you have been running Gentoo for months now and never knew about etc-update???
And you never wondered why some things didn't work?
I cannot believe you missed this VITAL piece of portage...but anyway, if you run it now, just take carefull note of what is getting updated.

Two ways to do this, taking into account that there will be hundreds of files that need updating:
One:
etc-update > update.txt (wait a while may take a couple of seconds to complete)
Ctrl+C and run etc-update again.
What this will do is write the output of etc-update to a file update.txt in the present directory you are in, either cd to /root or you /home/username beforehand. Why you need to kill it and do it again is because the output is not displayed in terminal so you will see nothing. Second time around you will see all the files that need updating, and by the looks of it there will be allot of them!
(Anyone know of a better way to log the output?)

Two:
Open two terminals next to each other and if you update a critical file, like /etc/make.conf or /etc/rc.conf, or /etc/lilo.conf, you can then update it in the following manner;
In the spare terminal, cp /etc/make.conf /etc/make.conf.old
Do the etc-update on make.conf and go back and review the changes and edit it as needed from the old config file.

Why should you either record or do this interactively? Because you can seriously mess up your system if one of the more important config files gets updated and you can't remember which one got updated or how it changed. If you followed one you can review the list if you boot from a LiveCd and try and find the problem, if you did two you know nothing got updated without you interactively interceding, and you have the old config files to fall back on should you need it!

Luckily there are not many such files that are system crytical, but rather be safe!! No need to back up ALL those files that needs updating, some just fix minor things like spelling and optimization, but definately back up the system critical files. Usually if it is in /etc, /etc/init.d/, /etc/conf.d/.

Good luck, and tell us how it went!


This post has been edited by My_World: Jun 11 2005, 05:47 PM

Excellent follow-up post, My_World. I agree with you that updating and understanding how it works is a vital lesson in keeping your system healthy. As for logging the update process, though your method could be described by some as crude, it's very simple and effective at the same time and as such I can't think of a better method to do so at present.

My_World I dont know, I just deleted the scripts that I know needed to change eg: net.eth0 and such. Oh well you learn something new. Out of anger I jsut selected update all with out backing the config files up which didnt turn out to badly in the end. I did have to go through them again and re configure a lot but it is all working.

Well thats one lesson that was learnt the hard way.