Re: [gentoo-user] update problems

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Sep 2015 20:37:53 -0400, Philip Webb wrote:
>
>> My impression is that using Portage has become more complicated
>> & its warning/error messages have not been given the necessary
>> attention. Complaints or pleas for help like the OP's here are quite
>> frequent & not all of them come from novices who don't understand what
>> Gentoo does.
>>
>> Portage sb able to report eg
>>
>>   "Pkg1 & Pkg2 (of Version1 & Version2) can't be installed together ;
>>   Pkg1 is needed for Pkg3, which you already have installed ;
>>   Pkg2 is needed for Pkg4, which you are trying to install.
>>   Please review your needs : you may need to remove a package
>> temporarily in order for Portage to proceed, then restore a different
>> version of it".
>
> Maybe it should, but if there is no one willing or able to take on this
> task, it won't.

So, kicking the overworked portage team with stuff like "Gentoo has a
lousy package manager" is not helpful and certainly violates the CoC.
I don't see that here.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that we all need to line up and
drink the kool aide and say that the behavior pointed out in the
original message is desired behavior.

We can acknowledge that bugs exist without lining up with signs
demanding their immediate fix.  The portage team does great work, but
the fact that package runtime dependencies can vary so much compared
to a binary distro greatly complicates the dependency-resolution
problem.  So do some of our package-maintenance practices, and those
are being looked at right now.

Something outsiders probably could contribute might be something like
a guide to portage troubleshooting on the wiki that lists some common
scenarios and their workarounds, or possibly working with the portage
team to get short references to such a guide added to the portage
output.  So, portage might suggest re-running it with --backtrack=# or
whatever if it outputs the sort of errors that backtracking is likely
to fix, and so on.  Just doing that alone would probably triage a
large number of issues that confuse users which makes them somewhat
happier and cuts down on list traffic.

-- 
Rich