On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 17:13:52 -0700
William Morder <doctor_contendo@...> wrote:

> I would be curious to know what are other people's methods. I've heard about 
> some net installations already. 

Well, my response was shock that anyone would actually have to do that much
work to reinstall the software on an existing system!  I'd just issue something like
"emerge --emptytree --keep-going world", go to bed, and expect 98% of
everything to be resolved when I got back up in the morning.  A Gentoo machine
is always easier to recover than to restart from scratch (and yes, it's possible to
switch out major parts of the infrastructure, like openrc <=> systemd and
udev <=> eudev, without hosing everything or even having to reinstall any package
that doesn't depend directly on the changed one).

I kept my old system installation for twelve years (2005-2017), despite a major 
hardware refresh about midway through that period, and *never* had to start over 
from scratch.  And the only reason I didn't just image the old root partition onto a 
new drive when I set up my current machine over Christmas was that I figured it was 
time to get rid of all the leftover cruft from more than a decade of rolling updates.

E. Liddell