glibc blocking libintl and libiconf

Illiander · Apprentice Joined: 22 Feb 2011 Posts: 255

I'm doing a world update, and ran into this problem:

sam_ · Developer Joined: 14 Aug 2020 Posts: 2159

How did you try "forcing the multilib flags"? Unmerging is never the right answer for this.

grep -rsin abi_x86_32 /etc/portage output please.

Illiander · Apprentice Joined: 22 Feb 2011 Posts: 255

sam_ · Developer Joined: 14 Aug 2020 Posts: 2159

I've explained it before in some other posts but I can't quickly find them now, unfortunately (I was hoping to link to some nice writeup I'd done before).

In summary, Portage is quite good at overcoming various obstacles, until there's far too many, and then it ain't. Unmerging papers over that by removing one obstacle (which might be an entirely legitimate one that it needs to resolve by skipping an upgrade or similar) but leaves the huge pile of rotting garbage (work) for it to do. Then another issue pops up, again might be entirely legitimate, and it tips over the edge again. You usually find that people who "have to unmerge" never actually do it as a one-off, it's habitual, and that's because they're working around an issue as a one-off, and not dealing with the issues that got them there.

Solving this requires checking the world file for last-rited packages or where fixed package.accept_keywords/package.accept_license/etc entries are required. One way to start checking that is emerge -pev @world --backtrack=0 (just for diagnostic purposes, you don't have to run it without -p).

As for the multilib issue, you surely don't have x32, so passing that isn't a good idea, but it's not clear what happened there. If you were using sudo, the environment variable may be lost depending on where you placed it (but you didn't mention using it). I don't see anything in your grep that would be disabling abi_x86_32, so it could also be that you had USE or ABI_X86 exported in your environment for some reason which was taking precedence.

But if you're already chugging along now, there's not much more investigation we can do.

Illiander · Apprentice Joined: 22 Feb 2011 Posts: 255

I wouldn't be surprised if the "have to unmerge" people are the ones who only update every 3-6(-12) months, given that (this was a 300+ days update for me). I know I've been one of them and I always seem to have something that portage can't handle.

Unmerging big userspace applications *feels* safe, but I still remember that time I unmerged ... I think it was python. Something critical to the build chain that broke portage. That would have been easier to reinstall than to fix, but I couldn't make new install media either. Had to do some insane recovery chroot stuff from a very old install disc.

I wonder if sync should have an option that says "only give me 2 months of updates"? Or do the underlying structures not support that? (Or does it already have that and it needs to yell at you with an "are you sure?" when you try to do a larger timeframe?)

Serious question: When I update next month (and I'm really going to try to actually update next month and not put it off) should I wipe the autounmask files and make it ask for things again, in case some of that isn't needed anymore?