When you are doing an 'emerge -uD world' or 'emerge A', if the version of package A that is going to be installed depends on B and the previous installed version of A didn't depend on B and B is blocking the installed version of package A but the new version of A is not being blocked by B then portage tells you: [blocks B ] =foo-bar/A-1.0 (is blocking foo-bar/B-4.1) [ebuild N ] foo-bar/B-4.1 [ebuild U ] foo-bar/A-2.0 [1.0] I found it when I was doing an 'emerge -uDa world', having installed x11-libs/openmotif-2.2.3-r3 which does not depend on motif-config, but the version of openmotif that is going to be installed (2.2.3-r8) depends on motif-config that blocks almost all versions of openmotif but 2.2.3-r8. $ emerge -uDp world (or emerge openmotif) [...] [blocks B ] =x11-libs/openmotif-2.2.3-r3 (is blocking x11-libs/motif-config-0.9) [ebuild N ] x11-libs/motif-config-0.9 [ebuild U ] x11-libs/openmotif-2.2.3-r8 [2.2.3-r3] [...] You need to uninstall openmotif and then reinstall it, so I think portage should do it automatically I'm using portage-2.0.53
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 79606 ***