Trying to emerge either gnome or kde results in an "circular dependencies" error
Created attachment 109992 [details, diff] reduce the noise level in the circular dependency debug output This patch will filter the noise so that it's easier to see the cycles. If it's saved as /tmp/circular_deps.patch, then it can be applied as follows: patch /usr/lib/portage/bin/emerge < /tmp/circular_deps.patch Generally, you can break dependency cycles by disabling use flags. For example, to break a circular dependency between media-libs/libsdl-1.2.11 and dev-libs/DirectFB-0.9.25.1, you can temporarily disable the either of the directfb or sdl USE flags for one of those packages via package.use. After both of them have been built, change the USE flags back to the original setting and rebuild the package that had a flag temporarily disabled.
(In reply to comment #1) > reduce the noise level in the circular dependency debug output I have solved the problem in the mean time, but I appreciate your feedback. Indeed, the amount of output gave me a hard time finding the cycle. It was a strange combination of alsa/jdk/doxygen. I'm still a beginner with gentoo, so it will take a while to get used to these things. There must be a better way to solve this though, maybe automatically discover conditional dependencies and performing the steps you just mentioned automatically. From the algorithmic point of view it should not be difficult, at least for the common case that you described, but I have no idea what it would take to implement it.
(In reply to comment #2) > There must be a better way to solve this though, maybe automatically discover > conditional dependencies and performing the steps you just mentioned > automatically. From the algorithmic point of view it should not be difficult, > at least for the common case that you described, but I have no idea what it > would take to implement it. I'm planning to rewrite the dependency resolver soon and that feature is certainly planned.
In addition to the reduced noise debug output, the nodes that are part of cycles are also displayed like a merge list with --tree mode enabled (including the USE flag settings). This has been released in 2.1.2-r10.
*** Bug 168697 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***