Bug 760783 – sys-apps/portage: warn when a package without existing ebuild in the repos is pulled in

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: CONFIRMED ---

[Description Pacho Ramos 2020-12-19 22:04:54 UTC]

Hello,

I have been fighting with an "emerge -uDN world" update in one of the systems I didn't update for some months. At the end, all the conflicts were caused by an old package that was removed some months ago that was still requiring python3.7 and, as a consequence, was preventing the upgrade. The errors where misleading (but that is a different old bug hard to fix) pointing to boost consumers or qt... 

I realized that maybe it would be nice if "emerge -vuDN world" would have warned me about some packages being pulled in even if their ebuild was removed from all the repos I have in my system (but package.mask entry dropped as it was dropped some months ago)

Thanks a lot

[Comment 1 Sam James 2020-12-19 22:08:50 UTC]

Would this be solved with a depclean after world upgrades? Or am I misunderstanding?

[Comment 2 Zac Medico 2020-12-19 22:22:30 UTC]

(In reply to Sam James from comment #1)
> Would this be solved with a depclean after world upgrades? Or am I
> misunderstanding?

It won't removed it if it's in your world file. The behavior related to bug 266836 and bug 651018 is related because it can prevent updates, causing older things to linger around.

[Comment 3 Pacho Ramos 2021-12-09 09:19:48 UTC]

Rethinking about this, I think that maybe it would be enough with adding a warning when running depclean and packages without existing ebuilds are present in the system

[Comment 4 Pacho Ramos 2022-01-29 11:45:42 UTC]

The warning would also be really useful when updating a system after some months as , most of the times, package.mask entries are removed upon removal.

Thanks a lot

[Comment 5 Sam James 2022-02-03 05:30:19 UTC]

I'm sorry, yes, I understand you now!

Aside: emerge -ep @world --backtrack=0 is quite good at exposing all of these, but people shouldn't have to do that.

[Comment 6 Tiago Marques 2023-06-13 16:43:05 UTC]

(In reply to Pacho Ramos from comment #4)
> The warning would also be really useful when updating a system after some
> months as , most of the times, package.mask entries are removed upon removal.
> 
> Thanks a lot

I second Pacho's comment. But I would say a warning is not really helpful, as portage is already very verbose by default.

(In reply to Sam James from comment #5)
> I'm sorry, yes, I understand you now!
> 
> Aside: emerge -ep @world --backtrack=0 is quite good at exposing all of
> these, but people shouldn't have to do that.

Running this, for me, returns this:

emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "sys-kernel/gentoo-sources:5.15.80".
(dependency required by "@selected" [set])
(dependency required by "@world" [argument])

But there is a 5.15.110 in tree. I guess kernel sources should use slots for middle version?

I think @world should never store the package version. And for kernel, the slots would be useful for LTS versions one might want to use.

More on the topic, I think there should be a standard command to upgrade the system. Say have 'emerge --upgrade' with no package arguments should do what portage maintainers think is necessary to upgrade the system.
If that involves @world, @system or @installed is up to Portage.

Ideally it would:

- Upgrade what it could with no breakage
- Preserve libs for packages that are not in tree anymore.
- Give you a list of what can't upgraded at the end.