Unintuitive info about slots from emerge

[hensan]

I installed Nethack today. If you have qt in you USE flags, nethack whats to install qt 2.3.2. Now at first I thought it was going to downgrade my qt from 3.1.2 to 2.3.2, which wouldn't be such a good idea, but I found out by searching the forums that 2.3.2 would be installed in its own slot, and leave 3.1.2 alone.

I think this is a problem, I think emerge should be more clear on the fact that it is not going to downgrade, but install in an other slot. The only clue you get is that the D is missing, which I don't think is quite enough.

Maybe there should be a new flag, S for slot or something.

[hensan]

Forgot to mention this. I installed nethack with 'USE="-qt" emerge nethack'.

But now, whenever I do a 'emerge -uDp world' it still wants to install qt 2.3.2, eventhough the /var/db/pkg/nethack-3.2.1-r1/USE file says -qt.

Just add qt-2.3.2-r1 to /etc/portage/package.mask you say? Tried that, but then emerge will fail during the Depgraph creation.

[El_Presidente_Pufferfish]

do you have qt in your make.conf USE flags?

[hensan]

Yes, since I use KDE, I need it qt, but I don't need or want version 2.3.2, and since i built nethack with USE="-qt", emerge -uDp world shouldn't try to install it.

I managed to get around this by copying the nethack ebuild to the portage overlay dir and remove all mention of qt, but this kinds of hacks really shouldn't be necessary.

[Pythonhead]

I saw a patch to portage on bugzilla that would clarify the slot. It would show a capital 'S' instead of 'N', or 'U'.

[hensan]

You are right, I assume you are refering to Bug 26139.

Unfortunately it seems that all bugs related to SLOT issues (including the above) are automatically marked as duplicates of Bug 4698, which really doesn't seem to be addressing this issue.