Bug 31487 – Kahakai-0.5 keeps forcing a downgrade to swig-1.3.16, and portage keeps upgrading to swig-1.3.19

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Jonathan Hitchcock 2003-10-19 03:38:07 UTC]

The x11-wm/kahakai-0.5 ebuild has a dependency on "=dev-lang/swig-1.3.16", so if you've got kahakai installed, portage will make sure that that version of swig is installed (when emerge'ing with -uD, of course), autocleaning all other versions off.

Because dev-lang/swig-1.3.19 is in portage, the next time you do an "emerge -uD world", swig will be upgraded to 1.3.19, cleaning off the old 1.3.16 version.

But, because kahakai is installed, and wants 1.3.16, the *next* time you do an "emerge -uD world", swig will be downgraded to 1.3.16, cleaning off the 1.3.19 version.

But, because dev-lang/swig-1.3.19 is in por...  Yes, well, I think you get the idea.

I can stop the cycle by putting >dev-lang/swig-1.3.16 into my /etc/portage/package.mask, but that is not a good solution.  If kahakai HAS to use the older version of swig, and will break with a newer version, well, then, that's unfortunate, and maybe an ewarn should be put in the ebuild, suggesting a mask for all newer versions.  I can't help but feel that kahakai will probably work with later versions, and that the ebuild should be changed to >= instead of = ?

[Comment 1 Michael Leuchtenburg 2003-10-20 23:13:24 UTC]

Kahakai does not work with swig 1.3.18 or 1.3.19 due to a bug in swig. It
should work with 1.3.20 when that is released, as there is a fix in the swig
CVS. Hopefully this will actually happen one of these months.. the problem
should go away then, though.

[Comment 2 Jonathan Hitchcock 2003-10-21 02:26:54 UTC]

This is a general problem, though - I can see it happening with other packages
and dependency relations, too.
What would the general solution be?

[Comment 3 Brad Cowan (RETIRED) 2003-11-06 23:16:13 UTC]

unfortunately Michael is correct, and you already have the only plausible
workaround at the moment