On Thu, 12 Jan 2023 17:53:55 +0000
Laurence Perkins <[email protected]> wrote:

I'm not sure if I'm doing something horribly wrong, or missing something blindingly obvious, but I've just had to boot a rescue shell yet again, so I'm going to ask.

To save time and effort, I have my big, powerful machine create binpackages for everything when it updates, and then let all my smaller machines pull from that. It works pretty well for the most part.

But when there's a glibc update I have to specifically install it first. If I don't, then about half the time emerge decides that because it doesn't have to worry about build dependencies for binpackages, it can obviously update glibc last... Then it

updates something that's needed for handling updates and that's it, stuck. If I'm lucky it's a compile tool, not one for handling binpackages and I can just tell it to do the glibc package next. Quite often though it's something like tar that's
fundamental to installing anything at all and I have to ferry the new glibc over on a USB stick and unpack it with busybox... Occasionally it's something critical for the whole system and then I have to boot to a rescue shell of some kind.

Think it's worth a feature request to have emerge prioritize glibc as high up in the list as it can when installing things? Or am I the only one who runs into this?

LMP

I was running into this issue too already, but then at some point I
started more regularly updating and this problem disappeared.
I fully agree, that glibc should be updated rather earlier than later, especially when compression libraries were built with a newer glibc.

/Andreas

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On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 12:54 PM Laurence Perkins <[email protected]>
wrote:

I’m not sure if I’m doing something horribly wrong, or missing something blindingly obvious, but I’ve just had to boot a rescue shell yet again, so I’m going to ask.

To save time and effort, I have my big, powerful machine create
binpackages for everything when it updates, and then let all my smaller machines pull from that. It works pretty well for the most part.

I do something quite similar, but have never had a glibc problem. Maybe the problem lies in differences between the specific details of our two
approaches.

I have 3 boxes with different hardware but identical portage setup,
identical world file, identical o.s., etc, even identical CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS
and CPU_FLAGS_X86 despite different processors. Like you, I build on my
fastest box (but offload work via distcc), and save binpkgs. After a world update (emerge -DuNv —changed-deps @world) , I rsync all repositories and binpkgs from the fast box to the others. An emerge -DuNv —changed-deps —usepkgonly @world on the other boxes completes the update. I do this anywhere from daily to (rarely) weekly. Portage determines when to update
glibc relative to other packages. There hasn’t been a problem in years with glibc.

I believe there are more sophisticated ways to supply updated portage trees
and binary packages across a local network. I think there are others on
the list using these more sophisticated techniques successfully. Just a
plain rsync satisfies my needs.

It’s not clear to me whether you have the problem on your big powerful machine or on your other machines. If it’s the other machines, that
suggests that portage knows the proper build sequence on the big machine
and somehow doesn’t on the lesser machines. Why? What’s different?

Perhaps there’s something in my update frequency or maintaining an
identical setup on all my machines that avoids the problem you’re having?

If installing glibc first works, then maybe put a wrapper around your
emerge? Something that installs glibc first if there’s a new binpkg then
goes on to the remaining updates.

Just offered in case there’s a useful hint from my experience - not arguing that mine is the one true way (tm).

HTH,

John Blinka



<div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 12:54 PM Laurence Perkins &lt;<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>&gt; wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">





<div lang="EN-US" link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72" style="word-wrap:break-word"> <div class="m_3838989122920637813WordSection1">
<p class="MsoNormal">I’m not sure if I’m doing something horribly wrong, or missing something blindingly obvious, but I’ve just had to boot a rescue shell yet again, so I’m going to ask.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To save time and effort, I have my big, powerful machine create binpackages for everything when it updates, and then let all my smaller machines pull from that.  It works pretty well for the most part.</p></div></div></blockquote><
div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I do something quite similar, but have never had a glibc problem. Maybe the problem lies in differences between the specific details of our two approaches.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I have 3
boxes with different hardware but identical portage setup, identical world file, identical o.s., etc, even identical CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and CPU_FLAGS_X86 despite different processors. Like you, I build on my fastest box (but offload work via distcc), and
save binpkgs. After a world update (emerge -DuNv —changed-deps @world) , I rsync all repositories and binpkgs from the fast box to the others. An emerge -DuNv —changed-deps —usepkgonly @world on the other boxes completes the update. I do this
anywhere from daily to (rarely) weekly. Portage determines when to update glibc relative to other packages. There hasn’t been a problem in years with glibc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I believe there are more sophisticated ways to
supply updated portage trees and binary packages across a local network.  I think there are others on the list using these more sophisticated techniques successfully. Just a plain rsync satisfies my needs. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"

It’s not clear to me whether you have the problem on  your big powerful machine or on your other machines. If it’s the other machines, that suggests that portage knows the proper build sequence on the big machine and somehow doesn’t on the lesser

machines. Why? What’s different?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Perhaps there’s something in my update frequency or maintaining an identical setup on all my machines that avoids the problem you’re having?</div><div dir="auto"><br></

<div dir="auto">If installing glibc first works, then maybe put a wrapper around your emerge? Something that installs glibc first if there’s a new binpkg then goes on to the remaining updates.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Just

offered in case there’s a useful hint from my experience - not arguing that mine is the one true way (tm).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">HTH,</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">John Blinka</div><blockquote class="gmail_
quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US" link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72" style="word-wrap:break-word"><div class="m_3838989122920637813WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal" dir="auto"></p>
</div>
</div>

</blockquote></div></div>

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On Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:17:29 -0500
John Blinka <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 12:54 PM Laurence Perkins <[email protected]> wrote:

I’m not sure if I’m doing something horribly wrong, or missing something
blindingly obvious, but I’ve just had to boot a rescue shell yet again, so
I’m going to ask.

To save time and effort, I have my big, powerful machine create
binpackages for everything when it updates, and then let all my smaller machines pull from that. It works pretty well for the most part.

I do something quite similar, but have never had a glibc problem. Maybe the problem lies in differences between the specific details of our two approaches.

I have 3 boxes with different hardware but identical portage setup,
identical world file, identical o.s., etc, even identical CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and CPU_FLAGS_X86 despite different processors. Like you, I build on my fastest box (but offload work via distcc), and save binpkgs. After a world update (emerge -DuNv —changed-deps @world) , I rsync all repositories and binpkgs from the fast box to the others. An emerge -DuNv —changed-deps —usepkgonly @world on the other boxes completes the update. I do this anywhere from daily to (rarely) weekly. Portage determines when to update glibc relative to other packages. There hasn’t been a problem in years with glibc.

I believe there are more sophisticated ways to supply updated portage trees and binary packages across a local network. I think there are others on
the list using these more sophisticated techniques successfully. Just a
plain rsync satisfies my needs.

It’s not clear to me whether you have the problem on your big powerful machine or on your other machines. If it’s the other machines, that suggests that portage knows the proper build sequence on the big machine
and somehow doesn’t on the lesser machines. Why? What’s different?

Perhaps there’s something in my update frequency or maintaining an identical setup on all my machines that avoids the problem you’re having?

If installing glibc first works, then maybe put a wrapper around your
emerge? Something that installs glibc first if there’s a new binpkg then goes on to the remaining updates.

Just offered in case there’s a useful hint from my experience - not arguing that mine is the one true way (tm).

HTH,

John Blinka

In case it is not clear what the underlying problem is:

Slow machine updates and is on the same set of packages as the fast
machine.

Fast machine updates glibc to a new version at time T1
Fast machine updates app-arch/xz-utils to a new version at time T2.
This version of xz CAN have glibc symbols from the very newest glibc
version that was merged at time T1. Everything is fine on the fast
machine.

Now the slow machine starts its update process at a time T3 > T2. The
list of packages includes glibc AND xz-utils, however xz-utils is often
pulled in before glibc which ends in a disaster.
Now you have an xz decompressing tool on your slow machine that cannot
run, because some library symbols from glibc are missing (because
glibc was not merged yet), and you're pretty much stuck in the middle
of the update with a broken system.

I have seen this kind of behaviour only when I have not updated for a
very long time the slow machine (i.e. no update for a year).

Anyway I think a reasonable default for emerge would be to merge glibc
as early as possible, because all other binary packages could have
been built with the newer glibc version, and could potentially
fail to run on the slow machine until glibc is updated.

Hope that clears up what happens, and why it fails to update / breaks
the slow machine.

Andreas

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On 17/01/2023 16:41, Laurence Perkins wrote:

That's not a terrible idea.  Although running emerge twice every time in order to check would slow things down considerably.  Probably better to
just get it through my thick head to update core libraries first.

I guess that could mean putting all those libs in an @set? Then you
could just do eg "emerge --update @libraries; emerge --update @world".

Or maybe what I do if I'm expecting trouble - "emerge --update @system;
emerge --update @world". I guess those libraries are in @system?

Cheers,
Wol

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