Trying to update my system, I find that I have a improper blocker dependency chain from SquirrelMail. The following should explain the situation: # emerge -uDp squirrelmail These are the packages that I would merge, in order: Calculating dependencies ...done! [blocks B ] mail-mta/courier (is blocking mail-mta/ssmtp-2.61) [ebuild N ] mail-mta/ssmtp-2.61 [ebuild U ] media-sound/alsa-headers-1.0.11 [1.0.10] [ebuild U ] media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.11 [1.0.10] [ebuild U ] dev-libs/zziplib-0.13.38 [0.13.36] [ebuild U ] dev-php/PEAR-PEAR-1.4.9-r1 [1.4.6-r1] [ebuild NS ] mail-client/squirrelmail-1.4.6-r2 Looking deeper.... # emerge -uDp PEAR-PEAR These are the packages that I would merge, in order: Calculating dependencies ...done! [blocks B ] mail-mta/courier (is blocking mail-mta/ssmtp-2.61) [ebuild N ] mail-mta/ssmtp-2.61 [ebuild U ] dev-php/PEAR-PEAR-1.4.9-r1 [1.4.6-r1] [ebuild U ] media-sound/alsa-headers-1.0.11 [1.0.10] [ebuild U ] media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.11 [1.0.10] [ebuild U ] dev-libs/zziplib-0.13.38 [0.13.36] SquirrelMail needs virtual/mta and any mta with sendmail workalike or a smtp server listening on port 25 should satisfy this (most mta's have both). Somehow the dependency chain is ending up with ssmtp, a send-only sendmail emulator which is appropriate for a desktop system but not for a server. This needs to get untangled, either in the SquirrelMail ebuild or the PEAR ebuild code. My server mail system is heavily invested in the courier mail server, and my customers depend on SquirrelMail. These to packages coexist quite nicely. If some intermediate package will resolve this, it should be depended from squirrelmail-1.4.6-r2.
# emerge info Portage 2.0.54-r2 (default-linux/amd64/2005.1, gcc-3.4.5, glibc-2.3.6-r3, 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 x86_64) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 x86_64 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.6.14 dev-lang/python: 2.3.5-r2, 2.4.2 dev-python/pycrypto: [Not Present] dev-util/ccache: [Not Present] dev-util/confcache: [Not Present] sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe" CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/bind /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/eselect/compiler /etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org/ ftp://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ http://gentoo.mirrors.tds.net/gentoo http://mirror.espri.arizona.edu/gentoo/ http://gentoo.cs.lewisu.edu/gentoo/" LANG="en" LC_ALL="en_US" MAKEOPTS="-j5" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/gentoo/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.us.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="amd64 alsa apache2 audiofile avi berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 cdb cli courier crypt cups dba dbm dbus dbx dri eds emboss encode exif expat fam foomaticdb fortran ftp gd gdbm gif gnutls gpm gstreamer hal idn imagemagick imap imlib ipv6 isdnlog jpeg ldap libwww lm_sensors lzw lzw-tiff maildir mhash mime mp3 mpeg mysql mysqli ncurses nls odbc opengl pam pcre pdflib perl php png posix pppd python quicktime readline recode reflection samba sasl sdl session sharedext sharedmem snmp spell spl ssl tcltk tcpd tetex tidy tiff tokenizer truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev usb userlocales vhosts xml xml2 xmlrpc xorg xpm xv zeo zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, INSTALL_MASK, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS
Not squirellmail or PEAR-PEAR. Reopen once you've found what depends on ssmtp (putting it to package.mask should tell you).
This was a problem w. the fact that I was using an unstable version of courier and it didn't show up in the dep tree. Adding courier ~amd64 to package.keywords solves the problem.
