Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie: > . What is all this trying to tell me? I've tried for over an hour to > make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over. My best guess is that > cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed > together. But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't > print. Or do I? cups-filters seems to be needed by cups. > > What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters? emerge -s is little help > here. Why do I need both of them?
* cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux Foundation). * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups- filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package is now unmaintained. So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do something stupid such as USE="-*") net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[foomatic] 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: net-print/cups net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic] net-print/foomatic-filters 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: any other printing system, e.g. lprng net-print/foomatic-filters So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic- filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package set from scratch. [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)] emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas K. Huettel Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde) [email protected] http://www.akhuettel.de/
