(this is a follow-up to bug 136638 comment #27) assume the following setup: a-0: depends on >=b-0 a-1: depends on >=b-1 a-2: depends on c a-2 and b-1 are package.masked. now try to emerge =a-0: # emerge -p =app-misc/a-0 These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild N ] app-misc/b-0 [ebuild N ] app-misc/a-0 this is all fine. but now try to emerge a: # emerge -p app-misc/a These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies - !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=app-misc/b-1" have been masked. !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request: - app-misc/b-1 (masked by: package.mask) For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook. (dependency required by "app-misc/a-1" [ebuild]) this obviously shouldn't happen.
*** Bug 137564 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is especially annoying with the xorg 7.1 because you need to package.mask all the drivers individually because of this.
"Me toos" won't help or this bug will just end up like the other one. As I said on the other bug, it's something that (at least some of us) know needs to be handled but is not going to happen overnight. Is there anybody working on it right now? Probably not.
might be worth asking Brian's SoCer, IIRC it is about dependency tracking, in pkgcore though
I see this is still a problem with the new dep resolver, but could it be that it became easier to fix this issue now?
Recent improvements haven't made this any easier to fix as far as I can see. To fix this bug, the resolver needs to be able to backtrack and try alternative paths after it goes down an unsatisfiable path. That puts this bug roughly on par with bug 1343.
This is fixed in svn r13816 with patch by Sebastian Mingramm (few) <s.mingramm@gmx.de>.
This is fixed in 2.2_rc34.
This is fixed in 2.1.7.