On Sunday 21 September 2008 14:08:46 haoniukun wrote: > Thank you for all your attention and reply. > I installed an older version of bash and reinstalled portage. > This works for me at least. > Now the system's working fine for me.
You'll probably find that you can now update python, python-updater and bash normally. What happened way back is that a new portage took advantage of new bash features, but in such a way that the new bash was required. Obviously, you can't install this new portage with an old bash (stuff won't work), so blockers were out in place. Trouble with that is, there is no way to tell portage you are updating both and it should just go ahead and do it. Portage will likely never do such a thing, as there is no guarantee when you start emergeing two packages that they will both succeed, so portage can't guarantee what the end result will be. The ideal solution would be to update bash, then python but that wouldn't work either as portage would always select them the wrong way round.... Sounds complex (it is), but fortunately this kind of thing is rare. I forget the finer details now, but the general method was not to just update bash, but to rather update it to an intermediate version, then update the other packages (which didn't block) and finally update bash to the most recent version. IIRC at the time, the blocker messages were confusing in the extreme, it was obvious to the developer what to do and not at all obvious to most other people. Most of us spent a lot of time scratching our heads back then :-) Welcome to the world of computers where the machine always does what you ask not what you want :-) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
