• 2004
  • September
  • 20
  • Linux is pretty useless when you can only issue one command in a shell (Re-emerging bash does nothing useful)

Linux is pretty useless when you can only issue one command in a shell (Re-emerging bash does nothing useful)
Written by on in Snaking.


Can't find any error reports about this situation, wouldn't even know to whom to turn for advice, as I have no idea whether it's a Gentoo problem, a problem with bash, a problem with my configuration, or what. Just in case anyone stumbles across this blog posting, I'll outline the problem, assuming I fix it some day I'll post a comment about how...

Comments

  1. Waldemar Osuch

    Waldemar Osuch on 09/20/2004 8:28 p.m. #


    Unfortunately I do not have slightest idea what could be wrong with your system but I would like to point that Gentoo makes it possible to keep multiple versions of packages.<br />
    During my upgrade to kde 3.3 I have kept 3.2 around until 3.3 was finished compiling.<br />
    Actually I was working in 3.2 all the time and only after making sure 3.3 works I have unmerged 3.2.<br />
    Additionally I remeber reading somwhere that if one uses binary packages during the initial install one is better off not to do any changes to make.conf. as it may screw up the system.<br />
    If I was in your place I probably would have typed<br />
    # emerge --emptytree world<br />
    followed by<br />
    # emerge depclean<br />
    but then again I am by no means an expert and the only thing I can offer is moral support.<br />

  2. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 09/20/2004 9:59 p.m. #


    I'm planning to do an emerge -e bash, I really don't want to rebuild the whole system, as it takes... well... a really long time...<br />
    <br />
    I had no problem with doing the 3.2.2 to 3.2.3 KDE update (and even went back to 3.2.2 afterward), but the 3.3 update wound up pulling in upgrades for dozens of other packages. At least one of those was marked as blocking 3.3's install, that is, it had to be removed to compile 3.3 (the upgrades basically moved my machine to the ~amd64 branch of portage).<br />
    <br />
    I've been using KDE 3.3 today while it builds all the various sub-modules (kde-network, kde-admin, kde-edu, etceteras). I didn't realise it would be possible to keep using 3.2. Should have figured that I suppose.<br />
    <br />
    I've been reading various notes regarding how to build in a chroot'd environment to do untrusted builds (i.e. compiling to binaries in the chrooted environment then moving the binary packages to the non-chrooted environment only when you trust the packages will work), but it seems rather involved when you really only want to do it for one or two packages.<br />
    <br />
    Anyway, thanks for the info and the moral support.

  3. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 09/22/2004 11:56 p.m. #


    As promised, posting the final solution here. Tried doing an emerge -e bash, tried doing all the various rebuilding tricks. Finally decided that I'd try un-setting the ~amd64 flag and rebuilding bash and all of it's dependencies (emerge -vauD bash). Since the flag was no longer set, this built bash 2.0.5, instead of the 3.0.x release it was using before. With that done, I have a functioning bash prompt again. Don't know whether the bug was really in bash 3 or in how it got linked, for now I'm just happy to be back to full functionality.<br />
    <br />
    I'm now rebuilding the rest of the system without the ~amd64 flag save for those few packages where I really do want the testing versions. The old Gentoo handbook way of doing emerges of testing packages (i.e. defining the flag on the command line for emerge) is, as far as I'm concerned just a bad idea. From now on will use the /etc/portage/ file tree for specifying flags, it's just *so* much more predictable.<br />
    <br />
    Don't know if any of the higher-level packages are going to give me problems now. Postgresql has complained, so I'm rebuilding it first, but KDE 3.3 seems to have loaded and is running fine AFAICS, but I'll still do an emerge -vuaD world just to be safe.

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