emerge -u textutils does NOT build/install new binaris; it does however uninstall the old one leaving a broken system. ebuild file textutils-2.1-r1.ebuild is quite small (481 bytes) vs 1246 forthe previos version and looks incomplete to me. Does not happen on systems with default install because textutils is one of the 3 "orphaned" packages: sys-apps/fileutils-4.1.11-r1 sys-apps/sh-utils-2.0.15 sys-apps/textutils-2.1 which are neither a part of system nor in the world file and thus are never automatically updated with emerge -upD world. I'll add a seperate entry for that..
It's indeed a broken ebuild. Reassigning to seemant who commited it.
it is neither broken nor incomplete. the purpose of the empty ebuilds is to have a dependency on *coreutils* which replaces all three.
Meaning it takes quite a bit of bad luck to get a broken system: - rebuild all installed packages before Sep. 12 - build coreutils before textutils etc. - emerge -u textutils after availability of the empty ebuild, resulting in removal of /bin/cat etc. agreed, not much that can be done about it now. And yes, I actually did manage to break my system that way.
