When upgrading Perl under Gentoo it’s almost typical to have blocks of the kind:
[blocks B ] <perl-core/File-Path-2.160.0 ("<perl-core/File-Path-2.160.0" is blocking virtual/perl-File-Path-2.160.0)
[blocks B ] <perl-core/Module-CoreList-5.201.905.220 ("<perl-core/Module-CoreList-5.201.905.220" is blocking virtual/perl-Module-CoreList-5.201.905.220)
[blocks B ] <perl-core/Archive-Tar-2.320.0 ("<perl-core/Archive-Tar-2.320.0" is blocking virtual/perl-Archive-Tar-2.320.0)
These blocks appeared when we tried updaring the Perl 5.26 to 5.30 (dev-lang/perl-5.30.0:0/5.30::gentoo from dev-lang/perl-5.26.2:0). This update is a major update.
So what does it mean?
The virtual package and the perl-core package should be the same version, but it appears there are no corresponding same versions to the virtual package versions (). The problem is that the update depends on a newer version of File-Path, Module-CoreList, and Archive-Tar but there are only virtual packages with the required versions. Virtual packages are just meta-packages and they do not install any module. First, what are the virtual/[perl-module] and perl-core/[perl-module]:
- perl-core/[perl-module] – perl independent modules. In fact, the same module may be independent and it may be part of the build-in packages from the Perl main package – dev-lang/perl. Sometimes you may choose the independent package, because of a newer version than the version included in the dev-lang/perl package.
- virtual/[perl-module] – perl meta-package, which ensures the installation of the module. The module could be an independent package from above or module, which is included in the main Perl package (in dev-lang/perl)
To solve the blocks of this kind “perl-core/ is blocking virtual/perl-” you must check for a newer version of perl-core/* if there is no newer version, just to remove the package and let the setup (emerge) use the module included in dev-lang/perl.
In our case, there are no newer versions of the three packages and we remove them with:
emerge -Cv perl-core/File-Path perl-core/Module-CoreList perl-core/Archive-Tar
And then emerge with no problems the new version of Perl with:
emerge --verbose --verbose-conflicts --backtrack=200000 $(qlist -IC|grep perl|sort|uniq) media-gfx/inkscape media-gfx/imagemagick dev-php/pecl-imagick
For detail explaination of why we use verbose-conflicts, backtrack, qlist and three excplicitly added packages you may read our article on similar subject – Gentoo updating perl with many masked and blocked packages
You may read the offcial documentation for more information – https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Perl#Introduction