[gentoo-user] The definite --complete-graph

[Roman Zilka]

Hi everyone,

the recent hint made around here by Neil Bothwick (thank you, Neil)
about --changed-use, which I hadn't been aware of, made me re-read `man
portage`. I came across --complete-graph, which is news to me too. The
manpage makes it sound like it's something I want, but I fail to get
its precise purpose. I tried googling for an answer, but ... well, it's
probably still a fresh feature.

Could anyone please explain its function? I thought the -D in 'emerge
-uDN world' was enough to ensure that all world packages and all their
runtime deps (recursively) are considered and updated/remerged, if
necessary. The manpage suggests that --complete-graph is different in
that it doesn't actually pull in update/remerge of deep (i.e., deeper
than immediate) deps of world packages. It just checks if any
updates/remerges of world packages (plus their immediate deps) causes
any conficts deeper in the depgraph. Is that all there is to the
difference between --deep and --complete-graph?

Thanks a lot for clarification.
-rz