30 Oct 2008

Portage blockage in sys-fs/e2fsprogs

Came across an interesting blockage in Portage this morning.

The biggest problem is that sys-libs/ss and sys-libs/com_err both block sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs, yet both are required by most things that use OpenSSL, and hence unmerging them breaks these dependencies.

This is especially annoying since net-misc/wget is broken by this as well, which means Portage cannot download the updated source archives!

The following solution works with Portage 2.1.4.5 (latest stable):

# emerge -v --fetchonly --deep --newuse --update world
# emerge -v --unmerge ss com_err e2fsprogs e2fsprogs-libs
# emerge -v --ask --oneshot --nodeps e2fsprogs-libs e2fsprogs
# emerge -v --ask --deep --newuse --update world
# revdep-rebuild

Seems Portage 2.2_rc12 can resolve this blockage itself (by performing step 2). This branch is still marked as unstable, however I haven’t had any problems with it on Mia.

Edit 13:16: Seems e2fsprogs* hit stable; thanks STL.