Rich Freeman posted on Tue, 22 Jul 2014 21:15:01 -0400 as excerpted: > On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 4:06 PM, Martin Vaeth <mar...@mvath.de> wrote: >> ...but by introducing all the additional complications Ian has >> mentioned. More precisely: What happens if new dependencies are >> introduced which are not satisfied? >> One has to face it: Portage must not just silently "update" the >> database and thus silently produce a /var/db which does not satisfy its >> own dependencies... > > While this is problematic, I think portage actually can handle this (but > I haven't tested this recently). Portage already allows you to clean a > package without its reverse deps leading to a system in exactly the > state you describe. I believe portage will just try to bring the > package back at the next emerge @world (or any other set containing the > reverse dep).
FWIW I tested this with a number of packages just the other day while doing an initial test-build of qt:5 and kde:5 from the relevant overlays. Various kde-workspace5/plasma5 packages can't coexist with the kde:4 versions, but I didn't want to remove the kde:4 revdeps or set- elements from my installed sets until I was sure the kde:5 versions worked fine. Apparently the kwin:5 version I was testing doesn't like my radeon turks (hd6670 IIRC) hardware their current v3.16-pre kernel drm drivers as once I had the whole setup installed and tried to startx with it, kwin ended up in a segfault/respawn cycle, so my surgical unmerge of specific kde:4 packages was just as well, making it relatively easy to simply emerge -k @world and get back to a working system from the binpkgs, automatically unmerging the kde:5 blockers on the way since I hadn't actually let portage put them in @world just yet. Yes, a simple emerge --deep @world pulls everything missing but needed back in, so that bit of portage at least seems to be working just fine. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
