Re: [gentoo-user] How to fix circular dependency?

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 14:56 on Tuesday 07 September 2010, Alex 
Schuster did opine thusly:

> Ajai Khattri writes:
> > OK, Ive managed to proceed a little further, but now Im encountering
> > this:
> >
> > # emerge -uDtpvk world
> >
> > These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:
> >
> > Calculating dependencies... done!
> >
> > !!! Multiple package instances within a single package slot have been
> > pulled
>
> > !!! into the dependency graph, resulting in a slot conflict:
> [...]
>
> > Not sure what this message means?
>
> It means that portage wants to install both dev-php/PEAR-PEAR-1.9.0 and
> dev-php/PEAR-PEAR-1.6.2-r1 at the same time. I don't understand why, looks
> to me like it should keep you already installed 1.6.2-r1 version.
> Do you need to have this package in world? Does the conflict also happen
> if not?
>
> In case you are running portage 2.1, you might give 2.2 a try. It is
> better at resolving such stuff, but still fails sometimes.

I don't have the dependency listing to hand, but I did study it earlier.

PEAR-PEAR-1.9.0 is being pulled in because something else has a dep on 
>=PEAR-PEAR-1.7.something

PEAR-PEAR-1.6.2-r1 is being pulled in because that specific version is a hard 
dep on something else.

Reading the output is easy, read it bottom up, paying attention to the 
prefixes (>, =, etc). The format is like this:

=packageA-v2 pulled in (not already installed)
>=packageA-v1 pulled in by
packageB-v1 (in world)

Or words to that effect. There's a lot of detail and it translates to 
something like this:

packageB has a dep on packageA. The exact dep is (follow with version range 
that packageB is happy with, straight out of DEPEND). To satisfy this, portage 
will install packageA-v<blah>

v<blah> depends on what is in the tree, the arch, contents of 
package-{un-}mask and various other bits.

Often one can get away with hardmasking recent packages that block which will 
force portage to find lower versions, hopefully something that satisfies all 
relevant DEPENDs

The OP has inconsistent requirements that cannot be fixed except by removing 
PEAR-PEAR, or by removing one or more packages the DEPEND on it.



-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com