Keeping your Gentoo nice and clean
Linux Gentoo is my primary operating system. Yes, I've tried Ubuntu/Arch, I've been down that road. The thing with Gentoo is that it works perfectly - it does exactly what I want it to do. And that means also that when I fail, my Gentoo suffers. It's like your dog.
Having been friends with my Gentoo for quite some time (ca. 5 years now, with 2 year break for Ubuntu), I've learned how to take care of my beloved OS.
First of all, the universal upgrade strategy (dah):
emerge --sync emerge -uDN world
When upgrading libraries, some of the packages that link to them can get broken. From time to time, it's good to fix them:
revdep-rebuild
When it gets cold in the winter, you may want to rebuild all your packages:
emerge -e world
GNU libtool files (*.la) can sometimes get confusing. To fix them you should install lafilefixer:
emerge dev-util/lafilefixer lafilefixer --justfixit
Removing orphans
Removing old and unneeded packages (often pulled by some removed package and called orphaned packages) is also necessary to keep things from getting messy. Do:
emerge -pv --depclean
to get the list of packages to be removed (check carefully for the packages you don't want to remove - this is important!).
To add the package to the world file (keep it installed):
emerge -n packagename
Then do:
emerge --depclean
to remove orphans.
Removing unneeded sources
To remove unneeded tarballs with package sources run:
eclean-dist -d
It is an alias for eclean -d distfiles and will clean /usr/portage/distfiles (it compares against the list of packages installed).
Thanks to chuso for mentioning depclean.
Arne Babenhauserheide
Did you test using the commands in cron scripts?
I use weekly update scripts which also always run revdep-rebuild after the saturday night update :)
That lafixer is important wasn't clear to me, so thanks for mentioning it!
What I'd add: I do a daily update with pkgcore:
pmerge @glsa
That pulls in all Gentoo Linux Security Advisories - most of the time important updates with short compile time. (You need pkgcore for that: "emerge pkgcore")
PS: Typo: "emergre"
PPS: My script in /etc/cron.daily/update_glsa_programs.cron
#! /bin/sh
### Update the portage tree and the glsa packages via pkgcore
# spew a status message
echo $(date) "start to update GLSA" >> /tmp/cron-update.log
# Sync only portage
pmaint sync /usr/portage
# security relevant programs
pmerge -uDN @glsa > /tmp/cron-update-pkgcore-last.log || cat /tmp/cron-update-pkgcore-last.log >> /tmp/cron-update.log
# And keep everything working
revdep-rebuild
# Finally update all configs which can be updated automatically
cfg-update -au
echo $(date) "finished updating GLSA" >> /tmp/cron-update.log