Project Talk:Portage/Changed dependencies

Documentation request
wish to have a quick little definition/note about "packages with stale dependencies" / "stale dependencies"

ex from emerge manpageː installed packages for which the corresponding ebuild dependencies have changed since the packages were built.

Thanks

This doesn't make it clear to me yet. It seems to be not simple enough to fit in a single sentence. Occasionally I run into this issue with binary packages (--buildpkg/ quickpg, not the -bin-variants). According to https://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/dependencies/ a variety of dependencies exists. For example libreoffice depends on icu and glibc. Many atoms in the tree of dependencies of libreoffice also depend on glibc. What exactly causes a change follows complex rules. This does not only involve slots but also ABI changes and major upgrades.

This section also omits emerge option --rebuilt-binaries. I couldn't find an enlighting description. It has various effects depending on host (world set) and other options like -g. Also repeated execution yields the same list of packages to be rebuilt.

I assume that the entire topic of dependencies in conjunction with the plethora of emerge options does not fit on a single wiki page. And there are even cases where emerge cannot cross the street without human assistance, e.g. (so called pinned version) or User:Sam/Portage_help/Circular_dependencies And sometimes even the tools show white spots on the map. For example qlist – the most capable of all query tools – cannot decode all atoms correctly. (This is my personal opinion and maybe I'm only doing it wrong. But qlist -IRv '>=sys-apps/dbus[X]' yields a result whereas omitting the operator does not: qlist -IRv 'sys-apps/dbus[X]'. But exactly this atom pops up in DEPENDS for example of libreoffice and is absolutely valid evaluating to »any version of dbus as long as USE=X is given«. And I also assume that the operator-variant is broken, too as it should not evaluate at all lacking the version part.)

I am unable to edit the page. In the current form it still leaves the (average) reader with more questions than answers.--Onkobu (talk) 15:35, 2 January 2023 (UTC)