For past couple of days I have been trying to understand the concept of world sets in gentoo linux but not getting a clear picture of it. How to differentiate it against 'emerge --sync' command and what does updating world set means?

When in doubt, refer to the documentation. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/World_set_(Portage)

Keep in mind the concept of "world sets" is unique to Gentoo and does not apply to other Linux distros. Not that I am aware anyway; I have never heard the term anywhere else.

[QUOTE=sevendogsbsd;6108223]When in doubt, refer to the documentation. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/World_set_(Portage)

I am really sorry for the mistake but I rectified it in my question. So, can you please explain the concept of @world set because I am really confused between it and the updates. Also when should I update my world set and when should I leave it untouched between updates or so?

So, since Gentoo compiles everything to update, everything must be updated to keep things consistent. I would follow this guide personally: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handboo...ing_the_system

Since compile times can take many hours depending on your system's specs, I would normally only do this once a week, maybe before you sleep. Up to you really but according to their docs, updating this way makes sure everything stays current.

Hope that answers your question.

Thanks for your reply. Well, I had already gone through gentoo handbook around 4 to 5 times and the link that you send me have been referenced by me many times too. But am not understanding that in what terms updating the ebuild and updating the world set can be seen as different. Someone told me that updating world set means that Gentoo is trying to update the USE flags according to the profile that we have choosen. But if that is the case then why updating world set takes too long? What does it do during that time period? Please correct me if I am wrong...

I really think “world” means “the whole system” but I am not entirely sure. I haven’t used Gentoo since it was split into stage 1,2,3 back in 2005,6, 7 or so. It is going to take a long time to build. I am building software on FreeBSD right now and Libreoffice, Firefox, Rust and the compilers take several hours even on a 4 core (8 hyperthreaded) i7 with 64GB of ram.

The perks of a source based system

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Thanks for that information. I will wait for a suitable person to reply....