I blindly followed a 'news' item's advice once on my home Gentoo Linux that said a particular version of glibc should be removed. Learned the hard way that you

I blindly followed a 'news' item's advice once on my home Gentoo Linux that said a particular version of glibc should be removed. Learned the hard way that you definitely want to make sure you have emerged another version of glibc first! Hardly anything works without it (can't even auth as root) Unfortunately unlike the cool cucumbers in this story, I hastily rebooted, and it took a fair while for various reasons to get hold of a boot disk and get it repaired and running again. I love Gentoo but it does take a lot of patience generally, and this kind of thing seems to happen fairly continuously (which teaches you a lot but requires that you want to learn and solve the problems yourself).