I've never experienced this before. Portage wants to re-emerge installed packages that have no different use flags and are not updates. Even when I allow it to emerge these packages, and re-run emerge --update world --deep -av --newuse, it wants to emerge them again. I believe this started happening since 2.1.2.9, and it persists after several syncs. Please send help. localhost ~ # emerge --update world --deep -av --newuse These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating world dependencies... done! [ebuild R ] sys-devel/gettext-0.16.1 USE="nls -doc -emacs -nocxx" 0 kB [ebuild R ] sys-apps/sed-4.1.5 USE="nls -static" 0 kB [ebuild R ] dev-util/subversion-1.4.4-r2 USE="berkdb nls perl python -apache2 -bash-completion -emacs -java -nowebdav -ruby" 0 kB [ebuild R ] sys-apps/dbus-1.0.2-r2 USE="X -debug -doc (-selinux)" 0 kB [ebuild R ] app-text/ghostscript-esp-8.15.3 USE="X cups gtk xml -cjk -threads" 0 kB Total: 5 packages (5 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 0 kB Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 161980 ***
Reopen.
As noted on the other bug - find a solution that doesn't confuse the hell out of users,
I think I'll fix the USE_EXPAND_HIDDEN hidden code so that these flags aren't hidden when a package is being reinstalled due to one of these flags.
I'd still say that re-emerging packages on this kind of IUSE changes is not useful, but the above solution is still much better than the current state of things. :)
FWIW, the current workaround to see the flags is this: USE_EXPAND_HIDDEN="-*" emerge <args>
Created attachment 124602 [details, diff] portage-2.1.3_rc8 patch to prevent flags from being hidden when appropriate This is fixed in svn r7238.
Thank you both for your help. Portage is the one of the few areas of Gentoo where I feel like I'm being treated with respect wrt bug reports. :)
This has been released in 2.1.3_rc9.