On 03/13/2010 11:04 PM, Chris wrote:
World updates are rare for me (once every 6 months if that). I come from a slack distro and I'm accustomed to handling everything directly. So I haven't automated system updates in any sort of fashion either. As for this package I am currently in the beta stage you could say, I just want to see it run, then I'll worry about getting runtime configuration that will survive updates.
You might want to do an emerge -u world before trying to install your package.
Generally gentoo QA ensures that ~amd64 packages work on a system that generally has current ~amd64 packages installed on it, and amd64 packages work on a system that has current amd64 packages installed on it.
Usually you can mix and match, but on rare occasion you can run into issues with that.
However, if you're running a system that is six months out of date from stable, and you're trying to install a package marked for testing, you definitely have the potential to run into issues.
Also - are you sure you've even synced your portage tree recently? It looks like the package you're trying to install is marked stable.
One thing that you'll find with Gentoo is that you do need to update fairly often. Not necessarily daily, or even weekly. However, if you install gentoo today, and then do an emerge --sync and an emerge -u world two years from now, I'd be surprised if you don't run into a bunch of errors, and you might even have to dig up packages from cvs to even have an upgrade path (for example, very old versions of portage can't even upgrade itself to anything other than the oldest version of portage in the tree - which might not be around in a year).
Try generally catching your system up, and see if the problem persists. It could be that the package is having compatibility issues with some library that was retired in the past, and generally we don't do QA checks against old packages that aren't in the tree any longer.
Regarding multilib - the other posts explained the problems - in general you as a user can't install apps 32-bit unless they're designed to be run that way, unless you just create a chroot with an x86 install of gentoo. Sure, it can probably be done for simpler packages if you REALLY know what you're doing, but this isn't my recommendation. Also, I think you may have gotten a little confused about what multilib actually means. In a nutshell it means having support for libraries built for more than one architecture in a single install. Gentoo amd64 has very limited support for this, but it isn't what most would consider "full" support so you can only use it for packages that are designed to use it by the maintainer, or for fairly simple stuff you build/install yourself (put it in /usr/local or somewhere not maintained by Gentoo). There is some desire for true multilib support, but I think the impetus has gotten weaker since 64-bit has become fairly mainstream.
Good luck! Rich
