I propose a system_update script to be part of gentoo core (always installed), which would do: 1) emerge sync (but only if it wasn't done very recently, in which case it would skip it) 2) emerge -u portage if emerge sync printed the "update to portage is available" message 3) emerge -u --newuse --deep world 4) revdep-rebuild If anything of it failed, the script would print detailed description how to try to fix the problem and restart the update process. system_update -1, -2 and -3 would restart the process from (2), (3), (4). I perceive the problem with system update being too complicated for ordinary user as severe.
~/.bashrc alias system_update="emerge sync && emerge -u portage && emerge -u --newuse --deep world && revdep-rebuild" Feel free to adjust to your needs.
This doesn't solve anything - average user doesn't know what to write into the alias, which flags for emerge -u world he should actually use etc. Moreover your proposed solutions is very crude and doesn't have some of the features I proposed. I still suggest this script to be created because the update would then be much easier and gentoo could be used by more users.
