Re: [gentoo-user] And so the emerge spake: Let there be conflicts...and see, everything was chaos and sin...

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 04/26/2015 05:28 PM, Philip Webb wrote:
>
>> More seriously, once you start working on (3), you'll realize
>> that just because the error msgs suck doesn't mean you can make them better.
>
> If they "suck", they're not worth issuing, are they ?
> I'm not willing to become a dev, so I'll never know if I cd improve them,
> but it doesn't follow that no-one else could.
>

They give you the information you need to update your question.

You don't need to be a Gentoo developer to contribute to portage. They
have a mailing list and all patches are posted there for review, Gentoo
dev or not.


>> If you're willing to wait an hour, it might be able to come up
>> with a list of ways you could resolve a conflict, but basically
>> all of them will be wrong, eg suggestion #1, uninstall everything.
>
> Really, this is a flippant response to a serious issue,
> which is being raised more often on the Gentoo User list.
>

It wasn't meant that way -- I was trying to point out that this is one
of those problems that sounds easy but turns out to be incredibly hard.

Dependency resolution is already slow when it only takes your installed
packages into account. It would take oh-so-much longer if you wanted to
consider "what if" questions involving the entire tree. And most of the
suggestions it would come up with are indeed ridiculous. Uninstalling a
few things in @world will probably solve your conflict. Is that not a
valid suggestion in some cases? Why not? Can you determine those cases
automatically without input from the user?

I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's deceptively hard to
(automatically) come up with a list of non-ridiculous suggestions before
the user in question dies of old age. Relevant xkcd:

  https://xkcd.com/1425/