Hi,

yes, it's no fun to update oldish gentoo Systems - especially ones that
should only receive security updates.

> My bugbear at the moment, is often a package is broken for more than one
> reason in my situation, and I find myself having to manhandle the
> package lists generated by the above three, building each package
> one-by-one, until I manage to rebuild them all.

Been there, done that... :/

> Concept:
> 
> Tool will be written in separate modules to handle:
> - ELF soname change breakage
> - Python module updates
> - Perl module updates
> - other checks that can cause broken packages...
> 
> Each check is run in order, generating a list of packages that should be
> rebuilt.


If you do a complete update, you will probably update the kernel (maybe
only for security reasons), too. In that case,
sys-kernel/module-rebuild, might be of interest here, too. It stores a
list of packages that compile kernel modules, and those will need
recompilation after a kernel update.

Best regards,

Craig