[gentoo-dev] Editing RDEPEND without a new revision (again)

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

Here we go again. All week I've been trying to update @world. I'm trying
to troubleshoot a portage bug[0], deal with portage taking forever to
fail, and now I've got to deal with the fact that someone was too clever
to follow the PMS and replaced virtual/pam with sys-libs/pam across the
entire tree (and immediately masked the package that we all have
installed) without creating any new revisions.

Thanks to the aforementioned portage bug, I can't follow the non-PMS
suggestion to update everything with --changed-deps. So I either have to
live with the fact that I have a masked package (virtual/pam) installed
-- which pisses portage off and makes it impossible to troubleshoot my
dependency resolution problem -- or try to uninstall it and then resolve
the rebuilds myself. This is how that goes:

  $ time emerge -puDN --tree @world

  These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

  Calculating dependencies... done!
  [nomerge       ] net-print/cups-2.2.12
  [ebuild  N    #]  virtual/pam-0-r1

  The following mask changes are necessary to proceed:
   (see "package.unmask" in the portage(5) man page for more details)
  ...
  =virtual/pam-0-r1

  NOTE: The --autounmask-keep-masks option will prevent emerge
        from creating package.unmask or ** keyword changes.

   * In order to avoid wasting time, backtracking has terminated early
   * due to the above autounmask change(s). The --autounmask-backtrack=y
   * option can be used to force further backtracking, but there is no
   * guarantee that it will produce a solution.

  real	4m37.909s
  user	4m35.287s
  sys	0m1.437s


Now I re-emerge cups, and try again. Then net-fs/samba fails. Then
sys-libs/libcap fails. Then sys-apps/shadow fails. Then
x11-themes/slim-themes fails. And so on. These are all things that I
have to sit in front of the keyboard for 4m37.909s, time and time again
to deal with, all because RDEPEND was changed without a new revision.

That's it, that's all I did for Gentoo today. I started out at 8am
trying to fix two bugs, and I spent all of my free time today unfucking
my system. Now it's 6pm and I'm out of time with nothing accomplished. I
haven't even found all of the packages that I need to rebuild yet, so
this is where I'll start again tomorrow, too.

And it's not like this is a rare problem. Please, just follow the damned
PMS and make a new revision when you change dependencies. It's not much
harder to do things right, so cutting corners and wasting my whole day
is pretty selfish. And as a bonus, the people who don't use portage
won't think you're an asshole for telling them to fix the problem by
using portage.


[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/698232