Migrating from Gentoo to Archlinux (part 1/3)

Alright. I've been a Gentoo user for close to 10 years. 2 months ago, I decided to do a system upgrade, and I got something like this (actually, not my own output, I copied it from there, but I got very similar output, every time I upgraded for the past few months):

# emerge -auDNvt world
[...]
Total: 198 packages (115 upgrades, 1 downgrade, 71 new, 7 in new slots, 4 reinstalls, 2 uninstalls), Size of downloads: 243,450 kB
Conflict: 9 blocks (2 unsatisfied)

 * Error: The above package list contains packages which cannot be
 * installed at the same time on the same system.

  (sys-libs/ldb-1.1.4::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by
    sys-libs/ldb required by (net-fs/samba-3.6.7::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge)
[...]
The following keyword changes are necessary to proceed:
[...]
The following USE changes are necessary to proceed:
#required by net-fs/samba-3.6.7[client,ads], required by net-analyzer/nagios-plugins-1.4.16-r2[samba], required by net-analyzer/nrpe-2.13-r2, required by @selected, required by @world (argument)
=net-fs/cifs-utils-5.4 ads
Use --autounmask-write to write changes to config files (honoring CONFIG_PROTECT).

!!! The following updates are masked by LICENSE changes:
- dev-java/sun-jdk-1.6.0.33-r1::gentoo (masked by: Oracle-BCLA-JavaSE license(s))
A copy of the 'Oracle-BCLA-JavaSE' license is located at '/usr/portage/licenses/Oracle-BCLA-JavaSE'.

You get the idea. 200 packages, probably a full night of compilation (on a decent dual-core laptop). Some of these packages will invariably fail to build, so I resort to using a command like:

# emerge --auDNvt world; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst; emerge --skipfirst;

This maximises my chances of getting most packages compiled (emerge --skipfirst skips the first package in the previous emerge command, in case it failed).

And then, even if everything compiles fine (it never does...), I still risk libraries dependencies problems, with essential apps like firefox or mplayer not starting up:

mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libx264.so.120: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

That means I need to run revdep-rebuild, and finally, after a day or two, I get an updated system... Great...

As long as you have plenty of free time to fix things, I guess that was fine... But I started to find that boring.

Time to make a move: in the next post I explain how I smoothly upgraded my system to Archlinux.