Just yesterday when I ran "emerge -u world" the libbonobo package was blocked by bonobo-activation. However, emerge doesn't give a clear description on what to do, so I looked at the portage user guide, which didn't mention it. Then I looked at the ebuild and I saw that it had the line !bonobo-activation so I went to look at the ebuild howto, and there was no mention of "!" in the package dependancies (possibly another bug?). To make a long story short, since a lot of people will probably be updating to the new gnome, the portage user guide should tell them how to deal with blocked pacakges so they don't report bugs on bugzilla. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
the ebuild howto does not cover everything ... it's an intro into 'howto create an ebuild' ... refer to the manpages if you want a manual for everything portage supports
Created attachment 18914 [details, diff] Adds a section describing blocked pacakges
Span, I wasn't looking for a manual on everything that portage supports. I was simply trying to find out what _exactly_ a blocked package was and how to appropriatly fix it. I only suggested modifying the ebuild-howto becuase that would have helped me figure out what to do. I'm only suggesting a change to the portage user guide, not the ebuild-howto, for users who don't even know how to open an ebuild and read it, let alone read the man 5 ebuild page. I felt that all of the references to the blocking of packages was to deep for the average user to find. In my opinion it is scary for a user to remove a package. Therefore they will not want to unmerge a package simply becuase portage said there was a block _unless_ they are also fairly confident that that an unmerge is exactly what portage is implying. I know that is how I felt. This may or may not be agreed upon; that's okay, it's just a suggestion. :)
my comment was in response to yours: > Then I looked at the ebuild and I saw that it had the line > !bonobo-activation > so I went to look at the ebuild howto, and there was no mention of "!" in the > package dependancies (possibly another bug?). i said 'no that will not be added to the howto because the howto is not meant for that'
Obviously there has been some miscommunication... I think we both understand what the other means. Hopefully no hard feelings. ~Michael Sorry for the extra bug traffic in advance
*** Bug 30691 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Patch looks very sane. Committing. Thanks for the help!
