Background,

Previously, I have built a number of Gentoo systems and after months/years keeping it updated caused so many obscure Portage errors that, eventually, each one of these systems stopped updating.

I am not a Linux newbie. Besides building Gentoo, I have recently successfully built two LFS systems (non-graphical servers).

Objective: build a non-graphical server from Gentoo and have it update properly long term (years).

Notes: I have looked at many internet articles on this topic (most of them are very dated) and have used the more complete of them to guide my updating. I have also read the Gentoo handbook on the topic of Portage and Emerge.

In your opinion, how would you safely update Gentoo?

TIA,
Rick

Personally, I wouldn't. I have a buddy that is a huge Gentoo fan and user, as I once was, but he doesn't use it for servers anymore. You might be OK because there are far fewer apps to build on a server than on a workstation, which probably means fewer errors. Die hard Gentoo fans will probably not agree with me on this but your call. If I wanted a server, it absolutely has to work with minimal effort and maintenance, period. Gentoo is very cool and can probably be used as a server but for me, it's way too much effort initially for little gained, and maintenance can be problematic.

My .02

Thanks for the post,

Unfortunately, it does not answer my question.

Rick

I think my point was that there will almost always be risks updating Gentoo because of the nature of the beast.

Well, this largely depends on your build, I guess.

Gentoo is a bit like C: it won't stop you from shooting your own feet. That's both a good and a bad thing, of course. If you want something that's well maintained, secure and don't have any special requirement you are probably better using CentOS or whatever else.

The thing with Gentoo is that it leaves you customize everything feature-wise when building, and without having to track the dependencies yourself. For me, that's the best single feature of Gentoo: USE flags.

For servers that can be a good thing, not because performance or some silly thing like that, but because less code paths usually leads to a reduced attack surface.

But, to give you a more accurate advice I would need to know something more about what kind of issues you experienced with Gentoo. To leave a system on an unrecoverable state you truly need to do something crazy, such as downgrading glibc or the like...

If you live on the stable branch, Gentoo is not hard to maintain, but, of course, in the case of servers you always have to be careful when updating, no matter if it's Gentoo or Ubuntu. You don't go deploying updates on production servers without first testing on a spare machine...

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To my knowledge,

I did not do anything crazy to cause the inconsistent Portage state. After months/years of updates, eventually, no updates would take place. There were lots of messages but I did not understand what they meant (TL;DR). I was on the stable branch. These machines were not in production, they were all test server's. I was/am doing a feasibility study on using Gentoo LAMP server's (long term).

I am going to start again from scratch and built up another LAMP server. If/when I encounter update issues, I'll post here.

BTW: I use https://serverfault.com/questions/99...e-gentoo-linux as a guide to update/upgrade, specifically:

emerge --sync
emerge -uDNav --tree world
emerge -avDN --depclean
revdep-rebuild -v -- --ask
dispatch-conf
glsa -check -t all
glsa -check -f all

Thanks for the info,
Rick