Hello, Gentoo.
Now able to boot into my new hardware, one of the first things I did was
# emerge --sync
. Fine. The next thing I tried was
# emerge -auND @world
, which is probably recommended in the handbook. This was anything but
fine.
I'm glad I'm not a real Gentoo newby, because I would have been
completely flumoxed by what came up on my screen.
For a start, I could barely read parts of it, which were displayed in
dark blue text on a black background. Setting up /etc/portage/color.map
is not the first thing a new user should have to do to be able to read
messages from emerge. This is, however, something I knew had to be
done, and I did it.
The error message was "Multiple package instances within a single
package slot have been pulled into the dependency graph, resulting in a
slot conflict:". Uhh???
Is this gobbledegook really what a new user should be seeing, having not
yet installed any packages, bar a very few, beyond what is requisite to
bringing a new machine up?
The actual conflict packages are:
dev-lang/perl-5.24.1-r1:0/5.24::gentoo
and
dev-lang/perl-5.22.3-rc4:0/5.22::gentoo
, "pulled in" by internal system packages I've got no direct interest
in, plus, shockingly, "and 2 more with the same problem" and "and 5 more
with the same problem".
I'm glad I've got the experience with Gentoo to know it's worth
ploughing on through these messes.
Other than that, it seems like a pretty ghastly mistake by Gentoo's
quality control. I know none of you get paid for it, and you all do it
for love. I admit I probably wouldn't have done the job much better
myself. But for Gentoo's sake, something needs to get better.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
