[gentoo-portage-dev] FEATURE=preserved-libs issues

[Paul Varner]

Since installing portage-2.2, I have had preserved-libs kick in twice on
all of my machines.  Each time that it has kicked in the emerge
@preserved-libs command has failed miserably and I have had to revert
back to using revdep-rebuild to fix the problems.

I'm not positive that this is neccessarily an issue with preserved-libs
directly, but I'm not sure what is needed to file the appropriate bugs
to get this feature working correctly.

Here are the two cases that I have found so far:

1. Upgrade to dev-libs/nss

During emerge @preserved-libs, evolution refused to compile.  It appears
that the compilation was still attempting to use the older nss
libraries.  

See http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-697944-highlight-.html for
someone else's issue with this upgrade.

2. Upgrade to www-client/mozilla-firefox to version 3

After upgrading, perserved-libs kept a couple of the older libraries
around and wanted to remerge firefox.  emerge @preserved-libs did not
get rid of the libraries and firefox would not run.  I ended up having
to unmerge mozilla-firefox and re-emerging to get rid of the old
libraries and to get it functioning.

My first question is what specificially do I need to collect to check if
it is a preserved-libs problem versus and application problem?

My second question is when revdep-rebuild is used in these cases, It
won't find the problems unless the --library option is used.  Is there a
portage API function that I can use to tell it to remove the
preserved-libs?  (I know this will cause software linked against the old
versions to break, and if I add anything to revdep-rebuild, it will not
be a default option)

Regards,
Paul
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