Re: Making a partition larger without affecting my OS.

On 3/15/26 3:14 PM, Wol wrote:
> On 15/03/2026 18:50, Dave Sizer wrote:
>> On Sat, 14 Mar 2026, Dale wrote:
>>
>>> Howdy,
>>>
>>> As some know, on my old and new rig, I compile my updates in a chroot
>>> environment.  Then I copy the binaries over and use the -k option on my
>>> running OS.  That way I don't have a crash when one program is updated
>>> and another it depends on is not yet updated.
>>> [...]
>>
>> I was surprised to read this... is such a process really necessary when
>> emerging package updates?
>>
>> I am pretty new to gentoo, but I assumed that this was something that
>> portage handled somehow already, although I admittedly didn't really
>> look into the details of how.
>>
> Portage has improved a lot of late. But there are probably still some 
> rough edges. I had a minor nightmare a month or so ago updating my 
> laptop. I'm expecting a major nightmare when I try to update my 
> desktop once I fix it.
>
> Gentoo is a rolling release from source, so things can go wrong. And 
> if you leave too long a gap between updates, they usually do. But you 
> should always be able to recover.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol
>


This is true and the problem I had wasn't really emerge.  It is just the 
way some packages work.  I open one program but it depends on two or 
three others and they need to match version wise sometimes. When they 
don't match, that can cause a crash or some other weird thing to 
happen.  After I ran into this problem a few times while on my old rig, 
I came up with doing my updates in a chroot and then moving the binaries 
over and just emerging the binaries, which is a LOT faster.  Even 
qtwebengine can install from a binary in just a few minutes.  The 
compiling process tho can take hours even on my new rig.  That's a long 
time for packages to not be in sync when trying to do other things.

So, not really emerge.  It's just more of a software out of sync 
problem.  I think emerge has come a LONG ways since 2003 when I started 
using Gentoo.  Back then, it took some effort to run Gentoo.  Nowadays 
it is pretty easy really.  Now emerge still outputs a cryptic error 
message that requires someone with a decoder to figure out but it has 
those error messages a lot less than it used too.

I guess what I do is a ounce of prevention so I don't need a pound of 
cure.  :-D

Dale

:-)  :-)