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Upgrades aren't necessarily that simple, even in Gentoo. Firstly, one ought to update the /etc/make.profile symlink to point to the appropriate portage profile. Secondly, consider the gcc upgrading guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gcc-upgrading.xml
It specifically states that there have been some incompatible ABI changes between binaries produced by gcc-3.4 and gcc-4.1 - presumably the C++ runtime library again. In any case, this is an important issue if the user decideds to explicitly activate the new instance of gcc with the gcc-config tool after installing gcc-4.1. As the majority of upgraders will most probably want to do exactly that, the most sensible procedure would be to to carry out the instructions mentioned in the guide: upgrade gcc, switch/activate, emerge libtool, emerge -e world then optionally remove the older version of the compiler. If you think about it, running emerge -uDN world would be a complete waste of time unless one intended to stay with gcc-3.x for the forseeable future ...
Finally, depending on the exact circumstances and not necessarily relating to the variations between official release snapshots, upgrades of certain packages can sometimes entail particular steps to "clean up" afterwards. This might entail running perl-cleaner, python-updater and/or revdep-rebuild (I'm sure I don't need to mention dispatch-conf/etc-update).
Anyway, this looks like a good release - well done to the Gentoo release engineering team 
Upgrades aren't necessarily that simple, even in Gentoo. Firstly, one ought to update the /etc/make.profile symlink to point to the appropriate portage profile.
To clarify, it's only necessary to do that about once or twice a year. Other than that, gentoo upgrades are indeed (mostly) rolling. Anything more complicated than that is often (though not always) due to upstream changes the gentoo people have little control over, e.g. changes in gcc or the switch to modular X.
However, it would be my advice (to anyone installing or reinstalling [why?!] Gentoo on a new box who wants to take it) to always use the very latest official release of the install CD's for your architecture.
Edited 2006-08-31 14:46
Also, I forgot to add that when switching gcc versions one really ought to rebuild the kernel and kernel modules in their entirety. The kernel does not like having portions of itself built with different compilers. I've seen this happen quite often with people who build external modules (such as nvidia-drivers), expecting to be able to use the modules with a kernel that was originally compiled with an older gcc version. It doesn't work. Although it's easily dealt with, the point is that there is no "automagic" way of taking care of all of this.
Edited 2006-08-31 11:42




Member since:
2006-06-22
Isn't it a rolling release anyway?
Could have just grabbed 2006.0 and emerge vauD world
Unless you have really new hardware that wasn't detected by 2006.0 CD