Re: [gentoo-user] emerge world / --depclean infinite loop

[Willie Wong <wwong@princeton.edu>]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 09:14:13AM -0800, Grant wrote:
> >> One of my systems with totally empty package.* files wants to emerge
> >> hardened-sources-2.6.25-r13 as it should, but --depclean wants to:
> >
> > How do you determine this? (I mean the "as it should" part?)
> 
> I just mean 2.6.25-r13 is the latest amd64 version so it should be installed.
> 
> > Are you running ~ or stable?
> 
> Stable.
> 
> >> >>> These are the packages that would be unmerged:
> >>
> >> sys-kernel/hardened-sources
> >> selected: 2.6.25-r13
> >> protected: none
> >> omitted: 2.6.27-r3
> >>
> >> If I do that, emerge world just wants to emerge it again.  Does anyone
> >> know how to fix this?
> >
> > If you remove it, what does emerge -pvt say?
> 
> This is right after running emerge --depclean which removed
> hardened-sources-2.6.25-r13:
> 
> # emerge -pvt hardened-sources
> 
> These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:
> 
> Calculating dependencies... done!
> [ebuild  NS   ] sys-kernel/hardened-sources-2.6.25-r13 [2.6.27-r3]
> USE="-build -symlink" 0 kB

So the question is, basically, why do you have 2.6.27-r3 installed? It
is ~amd64. Basically the problem is the following:

a)  emerge -pvt hardened-sources wants to emerge the "best" version
  available, which with your amd64 keyword is 2.6.25-r13. For some
  reason you have 2.6.27-r3 installed. Now, in many other packages,
  this will just cause the package to downgrade. The kernel, however,
  have each version individually slotted, so the downgrade will NOT
  remove the version that is, strictly speaking, not allowed to be on
  your system. 
b)  emerge --depclean defaults to behaving to unmerging all but the
  highest version number in the kernel. 

You have three choices that I can think of.

i) explicitly specify the version of hardened-sources you want to keep
in your world file, that way --depclean will not remove any kernel
versions that is specified in world. 
ii) unmerge 2.6.27-r3, that way 2.6.25-r13 becomes the most recent
version and will not be unmerged
iii) keyword 2.6.27-r3, that way the "best" available version becomes
2.6.27-r3 and emerge -pvt will not tell you to merge 2.6.25-r13

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.