[Eug-lug] F+!*ing Gentoo...

[Bob Miller]

This morning I grabbed my laptop to play a video clip for Anne.  I
didn't remember the filename, but I kind of remembered when I'd gotten
it, so...

    jetbumper ~> cd /some/distant/dir
    jetbumper distant/dir> ls -tr
    ls: error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.2:
    cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    jetbumper distant/dir> 

WTF!?!?

I'm running the so-called stable version of Gentoo, and had spent most
of the day yesterday doing the update from Hell.  Now, as the result
of that update, ls doesn't work.  It soon became clear that emerge
doesn't work either, along with some other common utilites.

Yesterday's update was from Hell because a new version of gtk+ was
marked stable.  That version linked with libtiff, and the installed
version of libtiff.la refers to /usr/lib/gcc-lib/.../3.3.4.  gcc 3.3.4
is no longer on my system, so gtk+ libraries won't link.

I spent a long time figuring out that libtiff was the culprit, then
re-emerged media-libs/tiff and finished up the update.  BTW, there are
49 more libraries on my system that reference gcc 3.3.4.  They'll all
bite me eventually.

I don't know the root cause of today's problem.  Sometime in the last
few months, the acl USE flag has been taken out of the default set,
and sys-apps/acl is no longer part of the base system.  Some ebuild
somewhere had had a dependency on it, but that dependency went away
and so sys-apps/acl got depcleaned.  Meanwhile, my copy of coreutils
had been linked to libacl, but with no package dependency.

A bug was filed on the libacl problem last April.  It's still marked
NEW.  I didn't look for a bug on the gtk+/gcc3.3.4 problem.

Meanwhile, I've discovered emerge's --newuse flag (wasn't there eight
months ago when I was setting these machines up).  My daily update now
does "emerge -Dvua --newuse world".  That should catch USE flag drift
as it happens.

Gentoo is wonderful when it works.  Nice, fresh software, lots of
features (or hardly any, if that's your preference), well-designed
startup scripts, all the cool stuff already packaged, true to its Unix
roots.  I do like it, even today.

But when it breaks, it's really ugly.  And it breaks far too often.

Sigh...  Still no perfect distribution.

The video clip?

    jetbumper distant/dir> stat --format='%y %n' * | sort
    [output]
    2004-12-20 21:50:41.000000000 -0800 F1_Gilles_and_Rene.wmv
    [output]
    jetbumper distant/dir> xine -f F1_Gilles_and_Rene.wmv

It's the 1979 French Grand Prix duel between Gilles Villaneuve and
Rene Arnoux.  You can see a differently edited version here.

http://www.green-flag.com/pages/welcome.php?id=videopage&id2=videomenu

-- 
Bob Miller                              K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com                     kbob at jogger-egg.com