Hi Alan,
thanks for your reply and sorry for the late response (I was kind of offline).
> Everything above this line is fascinating but completely unrelated to your
> post. Please omit such in future
I just wanted to motivate that I didn't just install gentoo and then ask my
questions immediately without trying to solve them by myself. But okay: no
social 1.0 here^C
>> For me some of the messages are mysterious. What is e.g. the exact meaning
>> of the four components in
>> ('ebuild', '/', 'net-wireless/bluez-4.39-r2', 'merge') or
>> ('installed', '/', 'kde-base/akregator-3.5.10', 'nomerge')
>
> It's just a statement that something will be merged, followed by the packages
> that caused it to be merged. It's all usually of the form
>
> "exact package" pulled in by
> "package spec from an ebuild"
> pulled in by
> "something else"
Okay, but what does e.g. the second component '/' in the above messages mean?
The first component probably denotes, if the packet is already installed or
about to be installed, but what is the 'merge' vs. 'nomerge' thing?
>> How should I resolve the conflict...
> Actually, you removed the relevant part of the output and didn't post it, so
> now we can't help you.
Yes, sorry for that.
> Please repost the full output.
Thanks for the offer, but the full output was extremely long. I was in a fatal
mood last weekend and decided to backup my gentoo system and then to cleanup
like you proposed. It took till today.
> When you identify the blocker, you have to ask yourself some intelligent
> questions, like:
>
> portage wants to merge packages A and B, but the ebuilds say that A and B
> cannot be installed together. What is pulling in A and what is pulling in B,
> and why? It might be a hard dependency, it might be a USE flag issue, it
> might
> be that the package is in world. Also learn how to read ebuilds
Well, just to give you an example: when solving the blocking states last
weekend,
emerge told me about a conflict between e2fsck and whatsoever other package. So
I
again tried to solve that by trying to uninstall e2fsck, see what happens and
then reinstall again before the next boot process. And that's exactly what I did
the last time, when I left my system unusable. After uninstalling you can't
emerge,
scp or mount anything because of missing dynamic library libcom_err.so.2.
Emerge gives you a
warning, when you try to unmerge, but it doesn't say that it's simply
committing suicide.
> Inspect you world file and unmerge everything related the KDE-3.5. Then run a
> --depclean o remove dependencies not in world, then run emerge -uND world and
> double check that nothing kde-3.5 related is pulled in. Rinse and repeat till
> this is true.
I tried the --depclean/-uND world stuff and later on several packets failed
building
because they were missing my kernel tree. I had to copy it from the backup.
Strange.
>> Maybe someone can explain how to proceed best. Are there some things I can
>> check using equery or whatsoever to support my decisions? I'm feeling
>> unsure how to handle these problems keeping the risk to leave my system
>> (partially) unusable as small as possible. Maybe someone can give me a
>> hint, where to find more information about how to handle conflicts in the
>> packaging system.
>
> Before anyone explains to you how to drive gentoo, you should help yourself
> first:
>
> 1. Re-read the install document. All of it. Maybe read it three times.
>
> 2. Read the man pages, all of them, several times. You can find this list
> with"equery files portage" and looking for files under "/usr/share/man"
>
>
> There is no easy way through this, you have to understand how portage and
> it's
> builds work and that involves study on your part.
Well, I didn't ask for getting explained how to drive gentoo. It's running for
several years now, but I'm aware that I'm simply using emerge without
understanding
some details. I asked for some info (e.g. best practices or examples) or some
hints where I can find more than in the man pages. I want to understand better
how portage works, but I don't find it easy to get the knowledge from reading
the
manpages (how often soever).
Cheers, Heinz
