something besides --update world and --update system

[rgzoso]

Ok, I have know how to do a --update system and a --update world with emerge but sometimes I find packages that are newer and are not masked that are still not picked up by world. Is there something besides world and system like an all? Just for example I just did a rysnc then did a --pretend --update system and --pretend --update world and nothing showed up to be updated but I did a search on nautilus and it needed updating. a --pretend nautlius showed 3 ebuilds that needed updating. So what give?

[phong]

When you do an emerge --update world or system, it ONLY looks for updates for things explicitly listed in the world file (or the system profile), but not their dependencies. However, if things in the world file DO have updates, it will also check it's dependancy tree for updates. The problem of updating dependancies is complex - let's say you install package A (explicitly, which lists it in your world file), and package B is installed as a dependancy (not listed in your world file). Then at some point later a security hole is discovered in package B and it needs to be updated. There are a billion possible scenarios:

1. You can update B, and A will keep ticking along just fine and doesn't need recompiling or anything to take advantage of the update.
2. You can update B, but A will have to be recompiled to take advantage of the update.
3. You can update B, but A will break, and have to be recompiled to work at all.
4. You can update B, but A is incomptable with the new version of B and has to have the old version around still to work.
5. Updating B breaks A and it is impossible for two versions of B to coexist.

I don't know if there is an elegant solution at all. It gets even hairier with more complicated dependancies (i.e. A depends on B and C or A depends on B which depends on C, or A and B both depend on C and D which depends on E, etc.)