Into.the.Void.

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 got confronted with an epic Gentoo failure. The problem is clearly described on Odi’s blog. 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.

You can read more about the bug on Gentoo’s bugzilla, here and here.

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 ?
b) Why wasn’t there a warning/alert/whatever on Gentoo’s website ?
c) 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.
d) 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.

I award Gentoo and e2fsprogs-libs maintainers a sad trombone. Sorry people but this is an epic failure. You deserve it.

Filed by kargig at 17:23 under Gentoo,Linux
16 Comments | 8,200 views