[gentoo-amd64] Re: kde-base components blocking each other

[Duncan]

Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.de> posted h0f7dm$9cd$1@×××××××××.org,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 07 Jun 2009 05:07:52 +0300:

> John P. Burkett wrote:
>> Today on an amd64 machine I did
>> emerge -D -uav world
>> and got a response including the following lines: [...] I would be
>> grateful for suggestions about how to resolve this blockage.
>
> The rule of thumb: "by unmerging all packages that have the blockers and
> running 'emerge -Duav world' again."

Yes.

In particular, in this instance, the old KDE 3.5.9 stuff is depending on 
kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.9(-rWhatever), and KDE's now trying to upgrade to 
3.5.10(-rWhatever), but finding blockers because kdelibs is one of the 
first upgrades, so you'd have the system in an inconsistent (according to 
dependencies) state temporarily, after kdelibs has been upgraded to 
3.5.10 but before the other parts of KDE (kdebase, kdemultimedia, kdepim, 
etc) have likewise been upgraded to 3.5.10.

Note that newer versions of portage have /automatic/ blocker resolution 
in many temporary cases, so depending on how old your portage is (of 
course I'm on ~amd64 and have had 3.5.10 for months now, and don't know 
if the feature is in stable portage yet), if at the --ask prompt, you 
tell it to go ahead, it may well take care of everything for you without 
you having to do anything else. =:^)

But, regardless of whether you have to fix it manually or not, note that 
there may be a point during the merge where parts of KDE won't run 
correctly, because you still have 3.5.9 components built against kdelibs 
3.5.9, trying to run against the new kdelibs 3.5.10.  It's unlikely (but 
possible) KDE will crash if you are running it at the time, but until 
everything gets brought back into consistency, you may have trouble 
starting any new KDE apps.  If nothing else, plan to restart KDE (or 
reboot entirely, tho that shouldn't be needed some people not 
particularly comfortable at the shell prompt find it easier) when the 
upgrade is done, so you get the benefit of all the new 3.5.10 goodness. 
=:^)

IOW, postpone the upgrade if you are planning a vital presentation or 
something right away, that you just HAVE to have a working KDE for, and 
anytime when processing blockers, be prepared in case the system does get 
temporarily inconsistent enough that part of it crashes.  The problem is 
of course somewhat worse with KDE than with a lot of things, because 
KDE's so big and emerging it takes quite some time on slower systems, 
thereby leaving a larger gap time during which the system isn't entirely 
self-consistent.

BTW, if you don't do it regularly already, when you're done with a big 
upgrade like this is a great time to run revdep-rebuild, to catch any 
library inconsistencies, etc, then emerge --depclean, to clean out any 
dependencies the old stuff needed that the new stuff doesn't, then revdep-
rebuild again, just to be sure cleaning out the dependencies didn't leave 
anything hanging.  Of course, as usual, use --pretend or --ask first, as 
appropriate, just to be sure it's not going to be doing anything 
unexpected.  With --depclean that's particularly important as it'll want 
to remove anything not in your @world or @system sets or dependencies of 
them.

FWIW, I always use -NuD (newuse upgrade deep) when I update, and I always 
revdep-rebuild and depclean after I'm done, just to be sure the system 
always stays as consistent and clean of cruft as possible, and because 
that helps keep the size of the job small enough to deal with since I 
always deal with it right away, before I get a huge backlog.  That's also 
why I like updating 2-3 times a week.  Even waiting a full week, the 
number of packages to update, particularly when there's a KDE update 
thrown in, can become big enough it's difficult to cope with.  If I 
update every couple days, then when the big KDE or xorg update comes down 
the line, it's almost all there is to worry about, where if I waited even 
a week, there's many more other packages to worry about too.  Not to 
mention if I waited a month, three months, or more, like some people do.  
That'd be a nightmare for me!

-- 
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