[gentoo-amd64] Re: Portage Fails To Find Updates

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 12/14/2009 07:43 PM, Frank Peters wrote:
> Today, doing an "emerge -pvDu world" I get the report that no packages
> need to be updated.
>
> But while checking the status of another package, I happen to execute
> "emerge -pv rpm2targz."  This then reports that the package rpm2targz
> needs to be updated.
>
> Why didn't the "emerge -pvDu world" tell me about this?
>
> Further checking reveals that all packages that are installed on my
> machine are contained in the /var/db/pkg directory.  However, the "world"
> file, which is located at /var/lib/portage/world, should contain the same
> listing but it does not.  I notice that some packages in /var/db/pkg
> are not listed in /var/lib/portage/world.
>
> Actually, the "world" file has 257 entries, while the "/var/lib/portage/world"
> directory contains 414 packages.
>
> Why has portage failed to add all packages to the "world" file?
> Have I been doing something wrong?
>
> In any case, I can rebuild the world file manually to accurately
> reflect the state my system, but, based upon this current observation,
> portage may fail to keep it accurate in the future.
>
> What is going on here?

What's going on is that you missed a few stuff about how Gentoo works :P

The world file contains the packages you merged yourself, not 
dependencies of packages pulled-in automatically.  Packages that are 
dependencies of other packages should never be in world.

"emerge -pvDu world" will not update packages that are build-time 
dependencies of other packages (as opposed to run-time deps).  If you 
want build-time deps updated too, you should also specify 
"--with-bdeps=y" in the emerge command.

Hope that helps :)