{"id":325,"date":"2008-11-15T17:23:51","date_gmt":"2008-11-15T14:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.void.gr\/kargig\/blog\/?p=325"},"modified":"2008-11-15T17:27:02","modified_gmt":"2008-11-15T14:27:02","slug":"gentoos-epic-phail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.void.gr\/kargig\/blog\/2008\/11\/15\/gentoos-epic-phail\/","title":{"rendered":"Gentoo’s epic phail"},"content":{"rendered":"

As some people already know I’ve joined the army since 2 months ago, this makes it somewhat difficult for me to keep up with the latest updates for every machine I use.
\nToday I tried to upgrade a machine running stable (x86) Gentoo Linux after more than 15 days since the last upgrade and I got confronted with an epic Gentoo failure. The problem is clearly described on Odi’s blog<\/a>. While trying to update e2fsprogs you have to uninstall the old version of them (so far so good), remove sys-libs\/ss (that’s also acceptable) and remove sys-libs\/com_err which is a dependency for MANY MANY progs, wget among them. So when you remove all these packages and try to install e2fsprogs-libs, wget can’t work anymore due to the missing libcom_err.so.2 file, so you can’t download the updates! You can’t open a new ssh connection to the machine either, so you can’t sftp the libcom_err.so.2 file from another machine! I had success by placing libcom_err.so.2 on a nfs share in another machine, mounting that share from the first machine and trying to re-emerge e2fsprogs-libs since wget could then work.<\/p>\n

You can read more about the bug on Gentoo’s bugzilla, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

a) Since portage is NOT ready to handle these kind of situations (according to bugzilla) why did the maintainers mark e2fsprogs-libs as stable ? Why didn’t they do ANY testing at all on the stable branch ?
\nb) Why wasn’t there a warning\/alert\/whatever on Gentoo’s website ?
\nc) It’s been more than 10 days since the problem first appeared and there hasn’t been any official solution about it, either by portage upgrade or by package masking.
\nd) Should I have googled or searched the forums before upgrading ? Possibly yes…but Gentoo didn’t have such upgrade problems before. I could accept it if problems on Gentoo were created by an upstream ABI breakage like dev-libs\/expat had not so long ago, but this looks to me as a totally Gentoo related problem and not an upstream one.<\/p>\n

I award Gentoo and e2fsprogs-libs maintainers a sad trombone<\/a>. Sorry people but this is an epic failure. You deserve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As some people already know I’ve joined the army since 2 months ago, this makes it somewhat difficult for me to keep up with the latest updates for every machine I use. Today I tried to upgrade a machine running stable (x86) Gentoo Linux after more than 15 days since the last upgrade and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gentoo","category-linux"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t