Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage newbie needs help -- Please ignore the other one

[Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 07:39:12PM -0700, Dominic Leland wrote:

> Even though portage seemed to merge fine, it would always fail whenever I
> would go into any other directory and try to do an "ebuild
> package-x.y.z.ebuild merge." I kept getting a "package already installed -
> unmerge first" error (even on things I knew weren't installed like
> Gnome-1.4).
> 
> The document's next step, assuming ebuilding worked, was to unmerge the
> existing file, but since I had just started my /var/db/pkg tree, I wouldn't
> have entries for anything I was upgrading.

Portage *does* require that the ebuild you are attempting to merge is located
in a category directory.  So, doing an "ebuild /tmp/foo-1.0.ebuild merge" won't
work, but "ebuild /tmp/sys-apps/foo-1.0.ebuild merge" should.

As for the "package already installed" error, I'm not sure what's causing this.
You can always forcefully remove the appropriate db entry by typing:

# rm -rf /var/db/pkg/[cat]/[pkg] (replace [cat] and [pkg] with category and pkgname)

However, this "package already installed" error is *not* a Portage 1.5 error.
So maybe you have an old version of ebuild hanging around and causing problems.
After merging Portage-1.5, do an "rm /usr/bin/ebuild" (it now lives in
/usr/sbin).

Sorry about all the problems.  For what it's worth, with Portage 1.5, Portage
is quite stable and is working well for Achim and myself.  Whenever we find
bugs in Portage, I normally get them fixed within a few minutes of their
discovery -- worst case, I get to them within a day.  These days, I'm focusing
on minor ones rather than biggies like you're experiencing.  Hopefully, we can
get Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc5 on ibiblio before more people start experiencing problems
with the now-outdated 1.0_rc4_pre2 -- the transition from 1.0_rc4_pre2 to our
"current" version on CVS is quite difficult due to major changes in Portage.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.