On 11/3/2021 11:03, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:

Hi,

it is currently not possible to smoothly run a world upgrade on a 4
months old system which doesn't even have a complicated package list:

[snip]

This is not about finding solution to upgrade the system (in this case
it was enough to force PYTHON_TARGETS=python3_8 for portage). This is
about raising awareness that Gentoo is a rolling distribution and that
we guarantee users to be able to upgrade their system when they do world upgrades just once a year (remember: in my case the last world upgrade
is just 4 months old!). If they cannot upgrade their system without
manual intervention, we failed to do our job.

Situations like this will disqualify Gentoo for any professional
environment like this will break automatic upgrades and you cannot roll individual fixes for each possible situation via CFM tools like Salt, Ansible, Puppet or Chef.

It would be very appreciated if everyone will pay more attention to this
in future. We can do better. In most cases we can avoid problems like
this by keeping older ebuilds around much longer for certain key
packages to help with upgrades.

Thank you.

Actually, it is possible to manage dependency errors like those. It just
takes a *lot* of elbow grease, and and long, long time time. Especially if
you have museum-grade hardware that these errors are happening on.

For Perl, I've usually just uninstall everything under virtual/* first, then try to let it upgrade. Sometimes that "unsticks" something in perl-core
enough to let the upgrades apply, pulling back in any needed items from virtual/. If that doesn't solve the problem enough to let emerge do an
upgrade cycle, I'll try using just the @system target, or start yanking
things out from perl-core/* one-by-one until emerge shuts up and does what
it is told.

Also, *always* check for libperl-www being in the package list. It's
usually sucked in by way of dev-util/intltool and is responsible for ~35-40 perl packages alone being pulled in. If that's in the list, try
uninstalling just that one, then run a depclean to remove all of its dependencies and then see if the upgrade will work. If the upgrade tries to drag intltool or libperl-www back in, use --exclude to hold it out for later.

That all said, am I alone in thinking that the way Portage emits error
messages about dependency resolution problems is extremely messy and border-line unreadable at times? The current way it outputs depgraph errors feels like something I'd expect from a --debug switch. We've got a
reputation for being playful and colorful on the command line with our
tooling, so I would wonder if that depgraph output couldn't be made to look....nicer?

--
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
rsa6144/5C63F4E3F5C6C943 2015-04-27
177C 1972 1FB8 F254 BAD0 3E72 5C63 F4E3 F5C6 C943

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic

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