It seems that xemacs depends on xemacs-base, which in turn depends on xemacs. # emerge -p xemacs These are the packages that I would merge, in order: Calculating dependencies ...done! [ebuild N ] x11-libs/dnd-1.1 [ebuild N ] app-editors/xemacs-21.4.15 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/xemacs-base-1.75 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/fsf-compat-1.12 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/apel-1.26 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/mule-base-1.42 # emerge -p xemacs-base These are the packages that I would merge, in order: Calculating dependencies ...done! [ebuild N ] x11-libs/dnd-1.1 [ebuild N ] app-editors/xemacs-21.4.15 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/xemacs-base-1.75 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/fsf-compat-1.12 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/apel-1.26 [ebuild N ] app-xemacs/mule-base-1.42 This breaks a nice script to clean up the world file I found in the forums (http://home.jesus.ox.ac.uk/~ecatmur/my-bin/dep). It will remove both packages from the world file and a later emerge depclean would remove all of the packages listed above. This is a Bad Thing(tm). OTOH, xemacs-packages-sumo doesn't depend on xemacs at all. It's pretty useless w/o xemacs installed, isn't it? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge -p xemacs 2. emerge -p xemacs-base 3. ./dep -w (the script mentioned above) 4. emerge -p depclean Actual Results: Both xemacs and xemacs-base are removed from world file and would be completely removed by emerge depclean. Expected Results: One of xemacs,xemacs-base should stay in world file, thus preventing depclean from removing xemacs.
The dependency is not circular. xemacs-base depends on xemacs, because it won't build without it. xemacs pdepends on xemacs-base, because it won't run properly without it. Thanks for noting the missing dependency in the sumo package, and also moving that to app-xemacs while we're at it.
