[SOLVED] sys-apps/yarn is soft blocking net-libs/nodejs

[GraviDDD]

Portage seems convinced that I can't have yarn and nodejs installed on the same system. This seems wrong to me given that yarn is a part of the nodejs ecosystem, but I'm new enough to gentoo that I'm having trouble figuring out the root cause here. Any pointers or breadcrumbs would be much appreciated.

[Hu]

Welcome to the forums.

As I read the ebuild, nodejs with USE=corepack blocks yarn. If you set USE=-corepack, the blocker will go away. I cannot say whether the functionality removed by choosing USE=-corepack will matter to you.

[GraviDDD]

That worked, thanks!

(Note to self/other beginners: If one package blocks another, check the corresponding `.ebuild` file (found in `/var/db/repos/gentoo/`) for the source of the block. In my case, the block was specified in the RDEPEND section.)

Hu, are there any other tricks I should know about? Was there some invocation of portage that I could have used to get it to tell me that was the use flag that caused the block?

[Hu]

I am not aware of a way to make Portage show this. You already used --verbose, and if anything would have made it volunteer that information, I would have expected --verbose to do it. It didn't. Perhaps someone more familiar with Portage behavior will have a better answer for you.

Although I read the ebuild to get an answer for you, in more complex cases, the blocking relation might be hidden in an eclass that the ebuild includes, or be generated by execution of some text processing, so reading the ebuild is not always a sufficient answer. You may get better results consulting /var/cache/edb/dep/var/db/repos/gentoo/net-libs/nodejs-22.4.1-r1 (or equivalent), but this appears to be generated by Portage only after dependency resolution. Additionally, since it is primarily for machine consumption, the formatting is a bit harder to read, and any comments in the ebuild explaining why blocks were added are not present in the edb file. Regardless, whether you read the ebuild or the edb, you will need some basic proficiency with the ebuild DEPEND syntax to make sense of the tokens. See man 5 ebuild for more than you probably want to know. Start with the section Dynamic dependencies, although everything under the outer heading Dependencies will likely be useful to you eventually.

[GraviDDD]

Thank you!