Newb portage / gnome question :(

[adamacious]

Hi .
I'm rather new to linux/gentoo, and I am having trouble updating software using portage.
For example, I have an older version of gedit, so I type emerge -u gedit, but it doesn't update it. Further, when I try emerging the newest gnome, I get a strange error

[96140]

You could try waiting until tomorrow (June 15) and re-syncing. Often odd Portage errors are caused by upstream tree problems, like packages being released too slowly. That happened when Gnome 2.10 first began to hit the x86 branch; several dependencies were released later than the rest of the package; I had to wait a couple of days before syncing again and getting a proper Portage tree.

Otherwise, what's your make.conf and/or package.keywords look like? And do you have any current Gnome packages installed? Do be sure that you aren't trying to mix x86 and ~x86 from the various parts of Gnome, otherwise you'll end up with all sorts of problems, not the least of which are circular upgrade and downgrade problems.

[apmurray]

don't specify the version when emerging. Instead just do an:

emerge gnome

[adamacious]

I tried just doing a simple emerge gnome, but to no avail (i already have gnome installed, so i just wanna update), and it would probobly be a good idea to mention that I am on an amd64 system. And nightmorph, sorry, but I am really new, and I have absolutelly no idea what re-syncing or upstreaming or ne of that is .

My make.conf is:

[96140]

Ahh, if you're an AMD64 issue, you might also want to stop by the AMD64 forum just to see if users have had similar problems to yours, on the off chance you have a compile problem.

But to clear up your confusion, "re-syncing" just means running another emerge sync, to grab the latest available package list. Also on that note, ebuilds and packages are maintained by what are called the "upstream" developers; that is, the changes they make to software and to ebuilds, and the final release of packages to we users trickles "downstream" to us. They finish the code, and put it out onto all the Gentoo mirrors for us to install.

However, if the package maintainers take their sweet time about getting the packages out to us, or if the Portage tree stored on several mirrors isn't updated (on those servers) has had something odd done to it, then dependecy problems might show up. However, usually not much ever goes wrong with the tree itself; pretty much any problems with it are only reflected by what the package maintainers are doing.

For example, the Gnome ebuild (what you're trying to get when you type emerge gnome is actually just a collection of smaller ebuilds for the scores of packages that make up the Gnome desktop; Gnome itself is only a meta-package, so to speak, with no actual files to install in it. But think for a second. What happens if Gnome 2.10 comes out, and the Portage tree is updated to reflect this, but not all of the required packages are available? What if the Gnome toolbar and applet files aren't released immediately, but the latest libgnomeui 2.10 and gedit 2.10 are available, but they depend on 2.10 versions of gnome-toolbar and gnome-applets?

You get dependency issues. This is exactly what happened when Gnome 2.10 was moved to the stable x86 branch from the unstable ~x86 branch. Many users had package dependency problems; I got weird error messages about packages that were required but couldn't be found, or blocked installation of other packages, and so on. After a couple of days, I ran another emerge sync, and the latest Portage tree was finally correct, and the last of the needed Gnome files were available. Of course, two days later there were some revisions of several packages already available, including gedit. I guess the packages, though they were finally released, weren't quite ready for the primetime if an update was made available so soon.

Finally, take a look at /etc/portage. That's where package.keywords is kept, but I'm guessing that you don't have anything special in it; it's just for unmasking certain packages that you want to be able to use, even if they're ~x86 or hard-masked. There's some other files kept in that directory, including your profile directory.

And, in the future, if you ever have trouble and someone needs to see your make.conf, it's easier to type emerge info and post the output here. That command gives far more detailed information about your system configuration and is more useful for troubleshooting.

HTH!

[adamacious]

Thanks for the great post, nightmorph . I ran emerge sync, but then ran into more problems .

[96140]

Again, blocked packages are talked about in man portage, or man emerge. In this case, that's what you'll see if you try to upgrade from Gnome 2.8 to 2.10. All you have to do is unmerge the blocking packages like so: