I've seen this kind of thing a few times before, most notably with avifile and drip. In this case, there is an update available for wxGTK, so portage upgrades it. Unfortunately, there is some program installed that requires on a version of wxGTK <=2.4.0, so portage downgrades it to not break the other program. I consider this behavior a portage bug, but as far as I know, there is currently no easy way to prevent this from happening.
To fix this problem we need a dependency checker that works with the whole installed tree, and validates it. We currently don't have such a checker and the current checker cannot be adapted to do that either. The problem is that it is very hard to make a checker to do forward and backward dependency checking and still being efficient.
We are working on this, and it is certainly high on our list of desired features, but currently there is not much to fix this.
I'm not very good with Python, but I'm interested in helping to design a better dependency checker. Could you give me a summary of the way the checker currently works or point me to a document that describes it? Or should I just learn Python?
-- Andrew Gaffney
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