Fixpackage does not fixpackages, it updates binpkg metadata. If packages are reported as broken as portage running fixpackages will NOT fix them. This is unintuitive. Change it's name to update packages. Also similarly, change the FEATURE to something that makes sense. UpdateBinPkg or whatnot.
If binary packages point have old outdated dependencies, they are broken. "fixpackages" will "fix" that. What message does portage give when it reports a package as broken? Perhaps that message could be made more clear. The only one I can find is "Invalid binary package" which says nothing about it being broken or fixable.
This bug was from a conversation on IRC, if I recall. Mar 07 20:46:02 jstubbs dunno about fixpackages.. Mar 08 03:55:50 jstubbs perhaps we should rename fixpackages to update-packages or something Mar 08 03:59:09 antarus cvs remove fixpackages Mar 21 00:30:54 antarus They should be there until fixpackages is run, yes? Mar 21 00:31:08 jstubbs no. fixpackages doesn't fix packages. Mar 21 00:31:22 jstubbs fixpackages just runs the updates on packages. Although in my experience if portage reports an Invalid package fixpackages has never fixed it. Looking at that secetion of code it seems like the category information is lost at that point. To me it's more of a staleness, same with the cache. You don't say the metadata cache is broken when it out of date, and binary package metadata shouldn't be any different. And if portage says you have Invalid binary packages, It's not a large leap to try to run fixpackages to "fix" the "invalid" packages and then complain on IRC when it doesn't work. If there is no way to fix an Invalid package, then the message should probably be changed to note the fact that the Invalid binary package should be deleted.
Quoting an irc snippet from 7 months ago with no context doesn't help. Nor can I see how jumping from "invalid" to "fixable" is a small leap. But advising that unusable packages should be deleted I can understand.
Created attachment 76590 [details, diff] Changes the message to recommend deletion.
In r2783 for release in 2.1_pre6.
Released in 2.1_pre6.
