Rich Freeman wrote: > On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 1:04 PM Jack <ostrof...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote: >> The basic idea is to upgrade as few packages at a time as possible - but >> you can't do just one because of these conflicts. > If you get stuck in a really bad dependency mess that is sometimes necessary. > > However, I'd first suggest just trying to update everything: > emerge -auDv --changed-use --keep-going --with-bdeps=y --changed-deps > --backtrack=100 @world > > It is quite possible that this will just be a complete mess since such > a long time has passed. > > If so I would try to do just those conflicts necessary to get portage > updated to start. Or maybe try the above command but using @system > instead of @world. > > However, nobody should be under the impression that it is normal when > updating to have to routinely update packages one at a time manually > trying to work through conflicts. As long as all the conflicting > packages are within the scope of an update command, portage should > generally be able to figure out how to handle this. > > Often when it can't it is the result of heavy-handed user > configuration (USE=-* and so on). I'm not saying that users can't do > that if they want, but right now portage doesn't have any concept of > soft use dependencies so anytime you stick something in a config file > portage will treat it as the gospel even if one small change to your > configuration will unblock a large logjam of conflicts. > > In an ideal world there would be some kind of prioritization of these > configs so that you could have softer preferences and harder ones, and > portage would just make a best effort to respect soft preferences > without micromanagement. >
I agree. I'd try to update world as well. I've had occasion in the past where doing a emerge -uaDN system would fail with conflicts but emerge -uaDN world would work, just with a really long list of packages to update. It's worth a shot. If nothing else, the error would provide more info. To the OP. Gentoo really needs to be synced and updated at least every few months. I do mine once a week. Some update daily. The downside of updating only after long periods of time, running into multiple problem updates that depend on each other. It's bad enough with just one of those to deal with but when you are hit with two, three or more, it becomes easier to reinstall with a fresh tarball and go from there. Updating is doable but it can be very frustrating and result in a loss of hair. O_o Didn't gentoolkit and portage have a circular deps problem several months back? I seem to recall it being tricky to get past but it has been a while back. This is another problem with updating after long periods of time. Old folks with foggy memory can't remember how they worked around a problem. If they didn't make notes, most of us forget to do that, then we don't remember how we got around it to share the solution, which often requires a decoder ring and a off the charts IQ. lol Dale :-) :-)
