it is possible to end up in situations like this: - dev-ruby/awesome_print-1.6.1::gentoo (masked by: use flag configuration mismatch) when an old binpkg exists and no ebuild exists any longer. It is a very confusing error message that basically boils down to "the binpkg is bad and we can't rebuild it" which would be much better served with an option to not consider the binpkg if it's out of date and cannot be rebuilt (in my opinion). One possible solution to this (which may be insane) would be to calculate deps based on ebuilds only, and then see if binpkgs happen to be available which match.
For the specific situation that you've encountered with the unsatisfied awesome_print dependency, I would expect the new output to be something like this: - dev-ruby/awesome_print-1.6.1::gentoo (masked by: corresponding ebuild is not available) Sounds reasonable?
> One possible solution to this (which may be insane) would be to calculate deps based on ebuilds only, and then see if binpkgs happen to be available which match. yeah, this would break a lot of flows. the nice thing for embedded systems is that you only need a binpkg host in order to install/update packages ... you don't need any ebuilds locally. we also see confusing error messages when binpkg rebuilds are required. but maybe that error message in general is not great, binpkgs not withstanding.
(In reply to SpanKY from comment #2) > > One possible solution to this (which may be insane) would be to calculate deps based on ebuilds only, and then see if binpkgs happen to be available which match. > > yeah, this would break a lot of flows. the nice thing for embedded systems > is that you only need a binpkg host in order to install/update packages ... > you don't need any ebuilds locally. > I suspect it'd be okay if we checked the repository it was from and we had a copy of it but the ebuild wasn't there.
Just to clarify my position here, I simply reported what was mostly a "less than helpful" message from portage. I didn't mean to suggest or require any specific fix, simply that "use flag configuration mismatch" is less helpful than some other messages might be to actually help the user resolve the issue. Any implementation details and message changes are left up to the portage team, to ensure it works for wider cases than just me. That said, even a message like "no binpkgs or ebuilds available to satisfy this dep" and then showing the dep would be a valid solution for me, and probably for Vapier as well.
