[SGVLUG] Any Gentoo Fanatics around here?

[Christopher Smith]

On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 15:28 -0800, Emerson, Tom (*IC) wrote:
> But... Am I likely to be "lucky" in that the "typical" way that people
> would set up Gentoo would include placing the data files for a web
> server under it's own partition?  (and/or other servers, such as postfix
> or sqirrelmail)

No, but you are lucky that Gentoo does keep it's configs in a fairly
sane fashion. The application stuff is in /etc, typically under a
subdirectory with the filename, alternatively under /etc/conf.d, and the
data stuff is usually kept where it should be. So, backing up the
relevant bits is usually easy.

Also note that the /etc/make.conf file and the contents of /etc/portage
are where a lot of the compile-time magic happens, so be careful if you
wipe the system to preserve that.

> What "gotcha's" am I going to find when attempting to update and
> possibly re-configure a Gentoo system?

Portage is really not designed to be left unused for extended periods of
time. The dependency graphs can often become circular and it just makes
it worse if you haven't updated in a long time. If you really need to
upgrade in place, you might want to consider switching to Paludis, which
is smarter about untangling all that mess.

--Chris