Not sure what happened, but I don't hit bug #621240 because portage has let me install blocked packages when upgrading to texlive 2017: # emerge -uDNpv world These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild rR ] dev-ml/OCaml-ImageMagick-0.34-r1:0/0.34::gentoo 0 KiB Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 KiB # emerge -pv texlive These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild R ] app-text/texlive-2017::gentoo USE="X cjk context detex dvi2tty epspdf extra games graphics humanities jadetex luatex metapost music pdfannotextractor png pstricks publishers science tex4ht texi2html truetype xetex xindy xml" L10N="af ar as bg bn br ca cs cy da de el en en-GB eo es et eu fa fi fr ga gl gu he hi hr hsb hu hy ia id is it ja kn ko la lo lt lv ml mn mr nb nl nn no or pa pl pt rm ro ru sa sco sk sl sq sr sv ta te th tk tr uk vi zh" 0 KiB Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 KiB # emerge -pv texlive-plaingeneric texlive-genericrecommended These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild R ] dev-texlive/texlive-genericrecommended-2016::gentoo USE="doc source" 0 KiB [ebuild R ] dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-2017::gentoo USE="-doc -source" 0 KiB [uninstall ] dev-texlive/texlive-genericextra-2016::gentoo USE="doc source" [blocks b ] dev-texlive/texlive-genericextra ("dev-texlive/texlive-genericextra" is blocking dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-2017) [uninstall ] dev-texlive/texlive-plainextra-2016::gentoo USE="doc source" [blocks b ] dev-texlive/texlive-plainextra ("dev-texlive/texlive-plainextra" is blocking dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-2017) [blocks B ] dev-texlive/texlive-genericrecommended ("dev-texlive/texlive-genericrecommended" is blocking dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-2017) Total: 2 packages (2 reinstalls, 2 uninstalls), Size of downloads: 0 KiB Conflict: 3 blocks (1 unsatisfied) * Error: The above package list contains packages which cannot be * installed at the same time on the same system. (dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-2017:0/0::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by texlive-plaingeneric (dev-texlive/texlive-genericrecommended-2016:0/0::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by texlive-genericrecommended
It's normal for emerge to ignore this blocker if one of the packages was previously installed with the emerge --nodeps option. You can also get into a similar state if you interrupt emerge before it has an opportunity to uninstall texlive-genericrecommended-2016. This situation will resolve itself if you run emerge --depclean to remove texlive-genericrecommended-2016.
(In reply to Zac Medico from comment #1) > It's normal for emerge to ignore this blocker if one of the packages was > previously installed with the emerge --nodeps option. > > You can also get into a similar state if you interrupt emerge before it has > an opportunity to uninstall texlive-genericrecommended-2016. This situation > will resolve itself if you run emerge --depclean to remove > texlive-genericrecommended-2016. Right, depclean cleaned it. It *might* be possible I installed dev-texlive/texlive-genericrecommended-2016 with --nodeps to force it a bit when doing the upgrade/dowgrade between 2016 and 2017 but dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-2017 was definitely *not* merged with --nodeps and that is the one with the blocker. Isn't it possible that emerge world restores to a valid state ? It seems weird to have to depclean to reach that point. Anyway, if not possible, feel free to close as invalid.
Yeah, we can certainly improve the behavior.