Bloody Gentoo

A week or two ago I was presented with this on two of my older Gentoo servers:


[blocks B ] sys-libs/ss (is blocking sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.2)
[blocks B ] <sys-fs/e2fsprogs-1.41 (is blocking sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.2)
[blocks B ] sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs (is blocking sys-libs/ss-1.40.9, sys-libs/com_err-1.40.9)
[blocks B ] sys-libs/com_err (is blocking sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.2)


This should strike fear into any Gentoo user out there. Usually when this happens, there will be a good result in Google which states exactly what to do. Not this time.
Importantly, you should wait for someone else to do this first and post in the Gentoo forums about it. Because Gentoo is not a professional distribution - far from it - as much as I love working with sources and portage (as a long time FreeBSD admin).
In this case, doing the obvious of unmerging the old blocking packages will render emerge useless as you will break wget. Yes, this is ridiculous.

Well, lucky you - I've done this now on both machines successfully and present to you the winning formula:


emerge -fv sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs sys-fs/e2fsprogs
emerge --unmerge sys-fs/e2fsprogs sys-libs/ss sys-libs/com_err ; emerge sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs sys-fs/e2fsprogs


We fetch the new packages before breaking the system. Then we break the system, then we fix the system with the parts of it that are still working. e2fsprogs is very much needed, unlike what I previously said here - it is what provides such gems as fsck...

Now I can continue emerging the weeks of updates that have built up. Including an OpenSSH 4->5 update that needs careful merging of configurations.

I really like Gentoo, but it can drive me crazy. It also has a problem with the people behind it - the culture is much like that behind Rails, in that I have a real problem trusting it. See the next post for an example from Rails...