Re: [gentoo-user] What's the best way to force a particular version of a dependency

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 5:07 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Unless you have a really good reason to do so, you shouldn't try to update system by itself.  It limits emerge and can lead to issues.

He's just following my earlier advice.  While what you say is true in
general, the problem is that he is trying to update a system that
hasn't been updated in ages, and so he probably needs to adjust dozens
of USE flags/etc or make other tweaks to fix things.  Using @system
reduces the scope of the update to try to at least get the core system
updated, but you're right that this might need to be augmented with
other packages.

Really though part of the problem here is that each time there is a
problem I'm seeing about 10 lines of portage output, when I probably
need 500 lines to figure out what is likely going on.  Half the battle
of the bug wranglers is getting people to just post all the stuff that
the new bug form asks you to attach - we don't ask for thousands of
lines of logs because we have nothing better to read...  :)

-- 
Rich