emerge -av pain

OK, so getting a Gentoo box up at home doesn’t look feasible in the near future. So I thoughts to myself, “hey, self, you have that old Gentoo server at work that’s going to be decommissioned soon, why not play with it until then?”

Why, indeed.

Looks like the last time I gave this box some love was in May of 2007.

So my first step, following an emerge-websync, was to try and upgrade portage itself. Except its blocked by a bash dep, which is blocked by the portage version. Ack. Trying bug 217479 initial suggestion of forcing an emerge of an older bash isn’t working either – sandbox error (literally, can’t build sandbox, though the fact that it wants to build sandbox really implies its still trying to upgrade portage). So ignore comment 7’s suggestion, because using

emerge -avO portage ; emerge bash

appears to be the trick that works. Now that forces portage to reinstall without its deps, so I’d really recommend following that you go ahead and re-emerge portage with

emerge -av portage

to pull in the deps. Just for sanity’s sake and all.

Then comes the real joy – my first emerge -auv system in years. The toll wasn’t as bad as I expected, actually, which I guess is a good thing. Had to hunt around for a few minutes to remember its the -C flag to remove a package – seems there are some blockers that portage can’t handle the uninstall for (or I’m too rusty to remember how to tell it to unmerge a package for me automatically). Off to see where the emerge -avu system fails – because I know its going to. That’s karmic for neglecting the server for so long 🙂