why do we have "lunar rebuild?"

[cornstalk]

The current documentation says that with "lunar rebuild" you risk breaking your system. I found that out a year or so ago, when I did a "lunar rebuild" on two machines and broke Lunar on each one. In each case I had to do a complete reinstall.

Why do we have "lunar rebuild" if it so risky to use? I don't think I will touch it again until it is said to be reliable. Why is it possible to break Lunar using this command?

I am a fine one to talk, I suppose, since I have never (yet) contributed to Lunar, but this question seems appropriate.

[ElAngelo]

i like lunar rebuild quite a lot... i used it 3 times already and it never broke my system ... it just fixed the whole machine...

[sofar]

There are a couple of sides to doing a rebuild that might affect your box negatively or positively. It's not always easy to figure out what will be the outcome of a rebuild:

* if your box is broken, how does a "rebuild" suppose to fix this?

* why not fix the broken modules first?

* if it works, don't break it!

this may not apply to the typical rebuild-after-fresh-installation at all, but you should remember that doing a blind rebuild may actually cause a cascade of problems if only one single compile fails (think glibc!).

it's always adviseable to do a `lunar fix` FIRST

Lately I have been rewriting some of the intelligence of lunar fix and it's improved a lot - if your system passes the `lunar fix` test you can consider a rebuild for optimization purposes, but you should not forget that lunar already comes i686 O2 optimized, and there is little more speed gain you will get out of your machine above that.

Hence the warning!