Re: [gentoo-user] 'emerge -e world' question

[Willie Wong <wwong@princeton.edu>]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:10:44AM -0600, Paul Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Willie Wong <wwong@princeton.edu> wrote:
> > Hum, I seem to have made an erroneous assumption.
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:38:05AM -0500, Willie Wong wrote:
> >> The problem with this last one is not --deep. It is --update.
> >
> > Nevermind, I looked at the changelogs for openoffice and
> > dev-perl/Archive-Zip, and frankly, I am pretty sure what I said was
> > completely wrong in this situation. And also, frankly, I am becoming
> > as confused as you are about your problem.
> 
> I "downgraded" to File-Spec-3.29 (actually an upgrade) which in turn
> emerged/updated the rest of that bunch of perl-related packages. Now
> I'm re-emerging openoffice-3.0.0 since it appears to be using a newer
> set of the go-oo.org patches (despite the lack of version number
> change). Plus it is always fun to see how long it takes to build one
> of the biggest packages there is. I have emerged it twice in the past,
> the first was 1hr33m the second was 1hr55m, so I hope this one won't
> exceed 2h.

I don't find that explanation satisfactory. (The one about upgrade vs
downgrades.) -u expands to --update means to install the *best
available version*, not the *highest version number available*. If an
ebuild goes from x86 to being hardmasked, --update should downgrade.
If an ebuild of insanely high version number gets removed, --update
should downgrade. 

I can explain why emerge openoffice and emerge --deep openoffice are
different. emerge --deep openoffice basically does something similar
to emerge --oneshot <everything openoffice has in its dependency>.
So every package in the dependency tree will be considered, and if not
at the *best* version it will be updated. Compare to emerge openoffice
where only if a change of ebuild in openoffice changes the dependency
will trigger installation of new or updated versions of dependencies.
(Basically, you already have a version of whatever perl class it
wants, and the ebuild specifies >= some really low version, so the
dependency is satisfied and won't be considered in the emerge.)

What I can't explain is why emerge --update --deep world misses the
update! dev-perl/Archive-Zip is (correct me if I am wrong: I didn't
see it mentioned in the changelogs so I assume it was not changed) in
the dependency tree of both the Nov 3 and the January versions of
openoffice. So --deep should traverse down there and find that one of
its dependencies requires an update. At least that's what I expect
based on "man emerge". 

Best, 

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong                                      wwong@math.princeton.edu
408 Fine Hall,  Department of Mathematics,  Princeton University,  Princeton
A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.