Portage needs a "skip errors" mode

kamagurka

i'm kinda annoyed. see, yesterday before i went to bed i started an "emerge -uvDat world". the update had close to 40 packages, and i was looking forward to new versions of firefox, thunderbird and much more; but when i stood up this morning i saw that lablgtk (the second or third package) failed and the whole freaking update went down the drain. now, i wonder why portage just didn't skip the offending package and anything that depended on it, got the hell on with the upgrade and told me about the error in the end. is there any reason for that?
if not, is this a planned feature or am i the only one to be annoyed by that?
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Raoul_Duke · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 11:41 am Post subject:

I kinda agree with you.....i've left a bunch of KDE packages to emerge overnight and had it fail 5 minutes after i've gone to bed.

I think something to solve this would be neat but the problem is actually quite difficult. Portage would need to know the difference between a casual dependence and a strict dependence. Also in a large update of packages, there may be certain choices.......ie update of QT fails. Does portage continue updating KDE packages or not? That's a very basic example but if you follow through with a large list of packages, portage would really need to know more about package relationships than just dependencies and USE variables. Then, it would need to be very precise about the kind of choices it made whilst we were snoozing. I wouldn't like to wake up and discover that portage had built the entire new KDE version on the old QT library!

It's a problem that we could do without, i just don't know if the work needed to solve it is worth the benifit.

Of course, that's only my opinion.....i encourage disagreement :wink:

edit: I guess you could fudge something that took your package list and emerged everything with '--nodeps --oneshot' and then reported the results at the end. Not perfect but it might work for small lists of 'not-very-dependent' packages?
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andrew_j_w · Guru Joined: 28 Jun 2003 Posts: 534 Location: York, UK

What about if you want to see the error message so you can fix the problem?

oberyno · Guru Joined: 15 Feb 2004 Posts: 467 Location: /bin/zsh

spb · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 12:54 pm Post subject:

The problem is in the dependency tracking. Obviously, if you're installing KDE for the first time, you can't carry on if Qt fails. With the way emerge does dependency tracking, once it starts merging it essentially forgets about the depgraph, and just works on a list of packages to merge. Doing anything different would require some heavy restructuring of the dependency tracking code (which is planned, but AFAIK not any time soon). If you're interested, the relevant bug is #51411.

kamagurka · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 1:16 pm Post subject:

oberyno · Guru Joined: 15 Feb 2004 Posts: 467 Location: /bin/zsh