Re: [gentoo-user] "Multiple package instances ....". Help me understand this emerge error, please.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Alan.

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 05:22:15PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 23/02/2014 14:13, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> >> - are you sure that's an emerge failure and not just a convoluted info
> >> > message? Perhaps post the entire emerge output.
> > I tried it again without the -p, and got the same output.

> > I think this is a portage bug.  At the very least, it's poor
> > documentation.  I've reported the situation to bugs.gentoo.org, bug
> > #502236.

> > Thanks for the help.


> I don't think you have a portage bug as such (other than the sloppy
> bizarre output messages that are going into recent versions). I think we
> have bug in an ebuild, probably a maintainer that doesn't quite know how
> to navigate these new subslots waters,

OK.  This is a bit philosophical.  The way I see it is even if the main
bug is in the libpng ebuild, portage should have a way of protecting
itself against whatever is in the ebuild.  Currently it's wedged.

> One of the other replies suggested to unmerge libpng, emerge it back,
> and continue with emerge world, @preserved-rebuild, revdep-rebuild.

I'll wait a few days on the response to the bug report, just in case
somebody wants me to probe the current state.

> Chances are this will work around the issue and let you update
> everything. There *is* a chance some package(s) won't work with or won't
> compile with libpng[1] and you'll have to unwind things again. If this
> happens that will be valuable info to add the entry at bgo

> [1] This happened to me at least once before, I had to package.mask the
> latest version of the library until the tree sorted itself out. IIRC, it
> was libpng then too!

Surely package management shouldn't be this difficult?

> --
> Alan McKinnon
> alan.mckinnon@×××××.com

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).