I'm beginning to grow annoyed, so I'm going to file a bug for this so we can reasonably work this out. In recent days, packages received the ELIBC and KERNEL types of USE flags. That's great, except that they're causing rebuilds of pretty large packages, like dev-lang/icedtea, www-client/firefox, mail-client/thunderbird and app-office/libreoffice to name just a few. This wouldn't be a problem, if: 1. I did not have Gentoo on so many kinds of computers: PS3, RPI 4B, Ryzen 2700 and Pentium 3 to name a few. 2. Rebuild times of these packages wouldn't be extremely long. Of the ones I listed, I only have dev-lang/icedtea installed on the PS3 and it took me over 2000 minutes to upgrade from 3.16 to 3.21, and now Portage asks me to do it all over again! Ryzen and RPI have all 4 installed and this is going to be painful on the smaller ARM computer. 3. There was a way of modifying the register of currently installed packages so that USE flags that do not have any effect could be added to the register, rather than pass through an emerge to have the changes go into the register.
I did explain on IRC that this is actually flags being "removed" (although they're really reverting back to whatever profiles set, given these things aren't toggleable anyway) -- you'd mentioned you thought FreeBSD support was being added, which isn't the case. I think there is actually a Portage issue here in that the effective USE for packages shouldn't have changed. (There's not much I can really say about point 1 or point 2? It's unfortunate, but it's kind of besides the point. The only actionable point here is 3. as a workaround or fixing Portage to not need rebuilds in cases like this where the flags are identical). (Note that you could modify /var/db/pkg yourself if you wanted.)
Don't use -U or -N if you don't want IUSE change related rebuilds.
Same/similar problem here. For me, something looks very odd/dangerous here! "emerge ... --newusw @world" tries to re-emerge about 40 packages here because of KERNEL= and/or USERLAND=. Among them are quite critical packages like the baselayout, intel-microcode, util-linux, lvm2 and others. Currently, these packages are installed with KERNEL=linux and USERLAND=GNU. However, emerge wants to re-emerge them with KERNEL="(-linux%*)" USERLAND="(-GNU%*)" It turns linux kernel dependencies and GNU userland dependencies *off*! (which would most likely break my system, I have linux kernel & gnu userland!)
I have emerged well over 400 packages at this point with completely useless changes across all those machines just so Portage can frig off when I make a full kosher system update. If we want to troll users with useless changes, why don't we make it really obvious? Why don't we add this to USE: FAVORITE_COLOR="(-yours%*) (-mine%*) (-blue%*) (-yellow%*) (-red%*) (-green%*)" To make it a real challenge, we'll fail the build randomly based on /dev/urandom results: swtich(fgetc from /dev/urandom % 256): case 0: yours; break case 1: mine; break case 2: blue; break case 3: yellow; break case 4: red; break case 5: green; break
(In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #3) > It turns linux kernel dependencies and GNU userland dependencies *off*! > (which would most likely break my system, I have linux kernel & gnu > userland!) No.
(In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #3) > However, emerge wants to re-emerge them with > > KERNEL="(-linux%*)" > > USERLAND="(-GNU%*)" > > It turns linux kernel dependencies and GNU userland dependencies *off*! > (which would most likely break my system, I have linux kernel & gnu > userland!) As I've explained, this is not the case. Harmless flags were removed from the ebuilds as part of cleanup efforts. It does not in fact remove support for the Linux kernel or GNU userland. It is entirely safe. (In reply to Michał Dec from comment #4) If you're not going to be polite, please don't participate in Bugzilla or the community. As I've explained, it wasn't "completely useless". If you wish to mitigate the effects, you can delay upgrading by a week or two, and/or do without -U/-N for a few weeks, and by then, most packages will end up receiving "real" changes anyway, and hence the number of "useless" ones will be minimised. Bugzilla is not for venting. One user who was particularly interested in this has started digging into why emerge even considers this a change (as I mentioned in another comment here). That's a far more productive contribution.
