No, we are not going to answer why someone will use Gentoo for Desktop, but well such human beings still exist and we have one piece of snippet the updating old dev-libs/icu package, because KDE Platform and new version of Chromium depend on a new version >=dev-libs/icu-59.
The main reason to include this update here is show how to deal with the dependency hell in Gentoo – multiple blocked packages and some old and deprecated packages, but still installed.
To summarize it up at the beginning how we did it
and then you’ll see what are the steps we took to resolve the conflicts and masked packages:
- Use verbose,verbose-conflicts and backtrack with emerge
- Remove only big GUI packages, which have really big dependency graph like office suites or development IDEs
- Remove obsolete packages – you do not need them, they can just make problems when updating, because emerge will take into consideration their requirements and dependencies and your update could be impossible!
- Include explicitly packages, which block our updates in the emerge line!
- use tools like “equery” (part of app-portage/gentoolkit) for checking dependencies and/or which packages depend on the queried package. You can use it with specific version for the package. “qlist” (part of app-portage/portage-utils) also is a handful tool.
- Sometimes when updating a group or a package with big dependency graph it is much easier to drop the -“u” update argument and to rebuild some packages with the updates.
More on the subject of update tips here: Gentoo update tips when updating packages with blocks and masked files
Keep on reading!