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
