Blockers or slot conflicts on a Perl update?

dilfridge

Many people run into portage problems when there's a major version Perl update. (Yes we're working to improve this.)

There's a lot of advice floating around, some of it correct, some of it unnecessary, and some of it straightaway harmful or dangerous. So, if you have problems with updating Perl, please visit our wiki page for up-to-date information (including both easy advice and the background story):

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Perl

Cheers! Your friendly Gentoo Perl team.

Stuck, --kallamej

jlpoole · Guru Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Salem, OR

Yes, I ran into problems performing a regular update:

jesnow · l33t Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 877

There used to be warnings on portage updates that you were possibly in for some issues, and you should update portage first. Could we have some warning that a problematic update is looming? Like am eselect news item or something that says this is coming and where to go for the officially approved procedure?

This perl update was a nightmare, and my system is vanilla stable.

Thanks,

Jon

saboya · Guru Joined: 28 Nov 2006 Posts: 552 Location: Brazil

Although I agree it's not a simple update, emerging with backtrack 50 solves most issues with the Perl update, I'd hardly call it a nightmare.

jesnow · l33t Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 877

And how long did it take people to figure out that was what to do? There were at least three different "this is how I did it" solutions that all involved a lot of time remerging broken packages. Not what you want on a "stable" system. There shoudl be a standard operating procedure published for the upgrade by the time it hits stable, as there often is for things that break your system before it's fixed, like major compiler or glibc updates.

I'm not whining, we want the maintenance of a stable system to be pretty straightforward. Gentoo has gotten much better in that regard since I started back in whenever.

Zucca · Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 9:43 pm Post subject:

Strangely I have had no problems with perl on my amd64 and ~amd64 systems.
But I've had major blockages caused by python and some by ruby.

I've put --backtrack=<some large number close to 1000> on my default opts. That might have helped me.
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Shoaloak · n00b Joined: 05 Nov 2016 Posts: 48

Thanks for the post, was already scratching my head when I failed to solve these update problems by myself.

piotr5 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Dec 2012 Posts: 121

ehm, the problems with perl is that emerge -uDNav --with-bdeps y --backtrack 100 @world will fail whenever a major change happened to perl, especially if you've installed about a thousand perl-packages. some of them simply are guaranteed to stop being supported in new versions? I don't know. anyway, thanks for gentoo-perl-helpers!

pacon · n00b Joined: 06 Jun 2019 Posts: 1

Hello,

Today I was troubleshooting a problem when running:

direwolf · Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2019 7:38 pm Post subject:

Thanks for posting that, pacon.

I had the exact same issues.

Rolling through 156 perl module installs right now, fingers crossed!
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Wallsandfences · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2010 Posts: 378

I run into a blocker as well, tried the solution above to no avail:

direwolf · Posted: Mon Jun 24, 2019 12:57 pm Post subject:

Well that's your list of packages. Pipe it to a file and turn it into a list.

Then run:

jesnow · l33t Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 877

I got fed up and just unmerged perl, then re-merged it and did perl-cleaner -all
that's for sure not the recommended way, but it worked.

Wallsandfences · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2010 Posts: 378

Didn‘t unmerging perl just kill your system??

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22608

No, there are many systems that are quite usable without perl. There may have been some applications broken, but all the functionality required for rebuilding perl should be fine.

jesnow · l33t Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 877

I wouldn’t try to do anything else like reboot in between, but in my case
It seemed so easy I’m surprised it’s not the standard way. Has to be a reason.
Jon

teika · Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:37 am Post subject: Use gentoo-perl-helpers

TL;DR: To upgrade perl, use gentoo-perl-helpers. Period.

Details:
"emerge world" (or "emerge perl") results in slot conflicts? It's a repeated complaint.
Fortunately, with gentoo-perl-helpers, perl upgrade works like a charm, (though it'll require some manual work.)

For usage, see the wiki article "perl".
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sao98021 · Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2021 6:56 pm Post subject:

yesterday i began the process of migrating over. it was from all the way back from 2019 i think. lol

i broke portage and emerge, prior to getting rid of python gettext perl gdbm autoconf and like 5 other things, so i had to make install them all outside of portage 3 other things and link that python to portage tarball i downloaded/extracted then finally emerge runs again. thannk you devs for all the work

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20482

[split] Perl upgrade, no updates for 1 year 250 days
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