Re: [gentoo-user] update problems

[Daniel Frey]

On 09/19/2015 12:36 PM, lee wrote:
>
>
> I could remove boost (and maybe reinstall it later), but I would like to
> keep ffmpeg.  hdf5 apparently goes back to having blender installed,
> which I would also like to keep.  And apparently, I would have to remove
> libreoffice before I could update.
>
> Why can't we just update like we can with any other distribution but
> have to run into dependency problems all the time instead?
>
> What do I do when I need to update /right now/ and find myself being
> blocked with cryptic messages like the above that leave me stranded?
> Once I used 'emerge --sync', there is no way to turn it back to continue
> to be able to install software if needed when the update cannot be
> performed.  Updates simply need to work, there's no way around that.
>
>

I just updated machines that were several months behind updates and ran
into similar problems. In my case, I had items in /var/lib/portage/world
that didn't really need to be there (as they were pulled in by a
dependency) that was causing portage to fall flat on its face.

For boost and ffmpeg, try running `equery depends <package>` and if no
result comes back it wasn't installed from a dependency. If it does say
another package is pulling it in, remove it from the world file by
using: `emerge --deselect <package>` - in the case of boost it would be
`emerge --deselect dev-libs/boost`.

Don't just remove them without seeing if they're being pulled in via
dependency though - if you manually compiled something outside of
portage you may have added the dependencies manually.

Once you've checked the packages for dependencies and/or removed some
items from the world file, try running the update again.

Dan