Hector Martin

sounds like a fun excersize actually, lol

I mean it does those things on its own. Sometimes it gets tied up in a knot though, there *are* situations it can't handle, and that's when it gets tricky to figure out "what's the one package I need to uninstall/rebuild to unjam this".

Circular dependencies are another usual one. You can't actually install a fully functional desktop system with certain features globally enabled in one go. Rarely happens on clean installs (since you tend to enable things progressively), but if you clone configs it does.

You have to disable the feature first, install some package, then enable it and reinstall (which breaks the circular chain). No real way around that (though it could be handled automatically but isn't right now).

ah, good to know.

Anyway, things have massively improved since the old days when I started. It used you be you'd get a libpng soname bump and your entire desktop was broken until you recompiled everything. Nowadays it's automated *and* keeps the old lib around in the meantime.

And also not everything depends on libpng indirectly, so no need to recompile everything. That was another big change, as-needed linking by default.

At least portage is moving in the right direction, dpkg seems to be back sliding a lot lately :| had to rescue my uncle's ubuntu 17.04 install because it got stranded.