[simoncion]

> ...or your package upgrades take too damn long and you need to use your system in the meantime, the programs you use can be subtly broken.

As you mention, this is true of every major Linux distro out there. In fact, in the nearly twenty years (ugh) that I've been using Gentoo, the only upgrade troubles I've run into are

* Temporary KDE screen locker problems (that is, the screen locker thinking it's "broken" and instructing me on how to manually unlock the session. (It didn't used to do this, and it was better when it didn't, because it would actually work.))

* Other KDE issues that are always solvable by some combination of restarting 'plasmashell' or 'kded'. (I'm super glad that both of those programs have a '--replace' flag. (And I haven't seen these particular problems in a very long time.))

* Firefox noticing that it got upgraded and refusing to let me work with anything that kicks off a new process

> ...most veteran gentoo users will suggest you use a chroot or a separate system to build packages for the system you're using.

Wild. I definitely fit the criteria for "veteran Gentoo user", and I would never, ever suggest that as a way to avoid the problem you're talking about.

AIUI, it won't work, or will be _complicated_ to set up (as programs not-infrequently need to build against new versions of libs, so you must _install_ those library packages in order to correctly build the packages that require them), or is identical to a binpkg build box (which -last I checked- was only encouraged if you had either a _very_ underpowered machine as your daily driver and a beefy build-box somewhere, or many, many systems that all could make use of the same set of packages, so saving time and power by having those packages built only once made sense).

EDIT: I looked at your forum post. I think you're inferring _way_ too much from the fact that two people that the forum software has given the tag 'Veteran' suggested "building in a chroot and then copying the packages over" (which closer inspection reveals to be either an overly-complicated binpkg build box, or a binpkg build box running in a chroot), and "set up a binpkg build box". Two people recommending this to you as a possible solution is _not_ "most" of the userbase... and the forum software's rating of them has no direct bearing on how good of a Gentoo admin they are. (I'm pretty sure the forum software still rates me as a "Newbie", as I've only ever made like four or ten posts. Most of my conversation happened over email, IRC, and the bug tracker.)

[nubinetwork]

I used to moderate those forums. The ranks are based on post count, or whether you contributed to Gentoo in some form (forum moderator, infrastructure, ebuild developer, council/foundation member, etc).

The rank shouldn't be seen as a qualifier of how much you know about the distribution.

[mid-kid]

My comment regarding the suggestion was mostly to highlight that it's the easiest solution to the problem that people can think of, not to mean that most gentoo users actually maintain their systems like that. I consider it unnecessarily involved.

[simoncion]

But you literally said

> ...most veteran gentoo users will suggest you use...

That's doesn't really agree with the claim that

> ...[I didn't claim that] most gentoo users actually maintain their systems like that.

[mid-kid]

I'm not sure how my statements are contradictory. The solutions people suggest to solve a problem aren't necessarily the ones they use. Most people aren't as bothered by the issue as I am, and as such won't need to solve it.