I just emerged the newest stable baselayout today during a system update. emerge attempted to update me to "sys-apps/baselayout-1.11.14-r2". The install appears to complete, but emerge died during the unmerge/clean process. Afterwards, all applications begin to fail system-wide. After rebooting to a live CD and investigating I found that all "lib/" symlinks were GONE. On 64-bit systems like mine there should be symlinks like the following: /lib -> /lib64 /usr/lib -> /usr/lib64 /usr/local/lib -> /usr/local/lib64 These were all missing. I manually created the symlinks and rebooted which seems to have fixed everything. I'll now be investigating further to see if I can find the exact cause of this. Please see the URL I added for the Gentoo Forums to see more discussion around this issue. Thanks!
I have re-emerged baselayout-1.11.14-r2 with no problems -- the symlinks still remain and everything is working. I then researched by emerge.log to see what happened at the tail-end of the system update -- before everything began to crash. It appears that things started breaking during the unmerge of the old baselayout (baselayout-1.11.14-r2): ------------------------------- 1137796330: ::: completed emerge (2 of 6) sys-apps/sysvinit-2.86-r3 to / 1137796330: >>> emerge (3 of 6) sys-apps/baselayout-1.11.14-r2 to / 1137796330: === (3 of 6) Cleaning (sys-apps/baselayout-1.11.14-r2::/usr/portage/sys-apps/baselayout/baselayout-1.11.14-r2.ebuild) 1137796330: === (3 of 6) Compiling/Merging (sys-apps/baselayout-1.11.14-r2::/usr/portage/sys-apps/baselayout/baselayout-1.11.14-r2.ebuild) 1137796345: === (3 of 6) Post-Build Cleaning (sys-apps/baselayout-1.11.14-r2::/usr/portage/sys-apps/baselayout/baselayout-1.11.14-r2.ebuild) 1137796346: >>> AUTOCLEAN: sys-apps/baselayout 1137796351: === Unmerging... (sys-apps/baselayout-1.11.13-r1) 1137796352: *** terminating. ------------------------------- Notice that there were still other ebuilds to be merged, yet emerge died at this point and terminated. Shortly thereafter everything started failing on my machine (new problems wouldn't launch, new terminals were having problems executing any commands, etc.). I suspect that the unmerge/clean removed the symlinks from the system and killed everything off.
FYI: I've upgraded a similarly configured amd64 machine this morning. It did NOT experience the problem on this machine. At the completion of the system update everything is still working. I investigated the status/existence of symlinks for my lib/ directories and found: lib lib32 lib64 -> lib This is slightly different than the linking scheme I re-created manually, as in case the "lib" directory seems to contain the native 64-bit libs and a symlink of "lib64" has been created to point to it. Now I'll have to investigate which way is the correct way -- I don't want anything else breaking in the future due to my manual fix. Anyway, I'm not sure why one machine had the problem and the other did not. There is one major difference that could be the factor: - On the machine that broke, I have Portage version: sys-apps/portage-2.1_pre3-r1 - On the machine that didn't break, I have: sys-apps/portage-2.0.54 Otherwise, both machines are updated regularly and run almost entirely "stable" software.
I can't reproduce this on amd64 or ppc64 or sparc64 multilib... if you experience it again, please let me know...