If a package has a masked dependancy, emerge -pUv package.ebuild will properly show what should be done but: emerge -U package.ebuild will fail if the ebuild depends on a masked package. EVEN IF THE MACKED PACKAGE HAS BEEN INSTALLED ALREADY. Case in point is mythtv-1.15.1.ebuild. It requires wget-1.9.1. wget is masked, so I manually upgraded it. (emerge -U /usr/portage/net-misc/wget/wget-1.9.1-r2.ebuild) This worked. But emerge -U mythtv-1.5.1.ebuild still fails saying that it depends on a masked package wget-1.9.1 Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Expected Results: Once I emerged wget-1.9.1.ebuild, mythtv should ignore the fact that it's macked because it's already installed.
This is why we use /etc/portage for unmasking packages. Read the portage man page for info on unmasking specific packages. The use of -U is considered a Bad Thing(tm) and is completely unnecessary.
Mr. Evans: Please mark this as 'invalid' and read the docs to find out about /etc/portage/* files, thus defeating the reason to pass *.ebuild to portage anyway, or to use -U
please read the last two comments, they solve your problem
Thanks to all, I'm reviewing the man pages to figure out what I need to do. However, this does bring up my ONE pet peeve about gentoo. This used to work just fine until the last portage update. It would be nice if functionality did NOT change from the default. As to -U, I'm still reading the manuals but this used to be an excellent way of stopping portage from downgrading packages. If there is a new file controlling this then I'll learn to use it but IMHO, you broke a great feature. Using -U instead of a file means I don't have to remember to put something in a file. Portage did all the work for me. Finally, many thanks to all because even with this one fault, Gentoo is still the best distro available. IMHO, etc... =C=
