Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses: reductio ad absurdum

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 12:22 PM, James <wireless@×××××××××××.com> wrote:
>
> Surely I can mask off these updates and stay with ::
> sys-libs/ncurses- 5.9-r4
>
> For a while, till things settle a bit?  Weird. I mask off a version
> and a newer, later version appears. wtf?

In your long post you didn't actually say what version of ncurses
you're expecting to have, or whether you're running stable or ~arch.
I can't tell you EXACTLY what to do without knowing that.

However, in general my advice would be to remove anything you added to
any config files in the last few days that mentions ncurses, do an
emerge --sync, and then update your system as usual, and it will
probably work just fine.

Masking off packages will probably make things worse.

>
>> Who last updated ncurses, and why?
>
> I believe you have 'hit the nail' dead center. Maybe a systemd requirement
> perhaps? I do not know.  I know, systemd is running git now?
>

Well, I posted the git log earlier, but vapier made the initial
commit.  The intent was to adjust the package slot on ncurses to be
more consistent with how everything else works, and it looks like this
was done in part to make life easier on Gentoo Prefix:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558800

The problem was that EAPI5 (which is only a year old or so) interacts
with slot moves (which have been around for a long time) in a way that
wasn't anticipated.  Devs comfortable with slot moves didn't recognize
that this would be a high-impact change, and so there wasn't much
testing, and it directly hit stable.  I think we'll be talking more
about that from a lessons-learned perspective.

Of course, ncurses being such an important package just made this a huge mess.


-- 
Rich