On Sunday, December 18, 2016 2:59:36 PM EST Peter Humphrey wrote: > This morning I ran my usual daily update and was presented with a long list > of kde-app packages, including KMail-2. The only problem was four blocks > that portage couldn't sort out on its own, so I evicted the existing > versions with emerge -C and continued. > > Then kleopatra failed to build, as in bug 602924. The fix there worked (I > should call it an evasion really) and kleopatra built ok. Then, on > continuing with emerge -uaDvU, another whole load of blocks arose, mostly > from portage trying to pull back in the versions of packages that had just > been superseded. > > There seemed to be no way out of that, so I took my sledge-hammer and > started an emerge -e world. No blocks were reported, so I think I might be > getting away with it. I'm about half-way through so far, and I'm writing > this via webmail. > > So, tread warily, anyone who is offered 16.12.0 versions of 148 kde-apps > packages.
Try running emerge with, e.g. --backtrack=1000. So, I've been running with a massive set of package.unmask for all of KDE- Frameworks, Qt, Plasma and KDE-Applications. I also have a cron job handling updates for me every evening. By an large it's worked fine...until a couple weeks ago. At that point, I wound up with a ton of slot conflicts that didn't make any sense to me, but I figured they were tree issues that would work themselves out. They didn't, and were getting in the way of a security update I needed, so finally I dove in and devoted some time to it this morning. I tried unmerging all of dev-qt/*, but that didn't solve the problem completely; portage was still unable to work its way around a simple upgrade from perl 5.22 to 5.23. Once I threw in --backtrack=1000, it started swimming right along. It *seems* like the default backtrack value, 3, is simply too low for someone like me who runs with --deep and --with-bdeps=y in EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS; once I bumped the backtrack value, portage was able to work its way through the dependency tree just fine.
