My experience with kits so far

[dkg]

Let me preface this post by saying I hope it will be constructive.  It's not my intention to simply complain or vent.

I wanted to share my experience updating one of my funtoo systems the past two days, because I feel that kits (so far) may not be living up to their promise.  I had hoped they would smooth over some of the headaches of system upgrades.  My upgrade process went something like this:

1. Blockers where USE=qt4 had to be added to several packages, successively.  That is... emerge @world; long wait; portage reports package needs USE=qt4; add USE flag; emerge @world; long wait; portage reports package needs USE=qt4; add USE flag; emerge @world; long wait; portage reports package needs USE=qt4; and so on.
2. Blocker related to libreoffice.  I had earlier keyworded libreoffice for stable only, as I really don't need the latest and it's a beast to build.  Well, at this time there isn't a single stable ebuild in the tree.  Oddly, there is still a stable ebuild for libreoffice-l10n.  Anyway, I had to remove the stable keyword.
3. To resolve some other blockers, I ended up using 'emerge -C' on 5 packages (e.g., kget and media-sound/picard).  I kept a list of these so I could re-merge them at the end.
4. I removed the 'legacy-systray' USE flag from plasma-desktop to resolve some other blockers.
5. About this time, I was finally able to get it to start installing some updates.
6. I'm getting odd build failures for virtualbox-modules, which I ignore for now and use '--keep-going' (will come back to this).
7. Encountered a build failure in package pambase.  With research, found an issue in the tracker that was fixed yesterday morning, so needed to 'ego sync' mid-upgrade.
8. Now, it's 'emerge @preserved-rebuild' time, but it's blocked by a conflict with package doomsday.  Use 'emerge -C doomsday' to resolve.
9. I think it was here that I dealt with the app-emulation/wine to virtual/wine change.  Not terrible, though I was a bit confused why I seem to need wine-vanilla if all I want is wine-staging.  Perhaps I could if I emerge 'app-emulation/wine-staging' directly instead of going through 'virtual/wine'?  I didn't want to stop the upgrade at this time to figure it out.
10. Time to resolve issue with virtualbox-modules.  It's giving multiple complaints that it "can't find Makefile" and "can't find .config file", and that I need to make sure that '/usr/src/linux' points to a full kernel source tree.  I check, there is nothing wrong with the symlink, it points to the folder for the current running kernel, the folder contains a Makefile and .config file, and the folder still contains sources.  The only possible problem I can figure is the ebuild for this kernel is no longer in the portage tree.  So, I stop to upgrade the kernel, and the problem goes away.
11. Now it's time to re-merge the packages I removed earlier, one of which is quodlibet.  Only, portage complains it can't install the latest quodlibet because of some funky python issue with package dev-python/faulthandler I don't understand.  I find no mention of this in JIRA or forums, so I just let it install the old version.
12. I've just now discovered that portage is no longer picking up my local overlay.  I'll need to research that, too.

It's certainly wasn't the most painful gentoo/funtoo upgrade I've ever been through, but I can't really say it was any easier than typical.  Especially considering this was a shorter upgrade cycle than usual for me (only about a month), and I keep customizations on this system to a minimum.  Anyway, as I said at the outset, I wanted to share my experience in the hopes it is constructive.

Cheers!