How to list all unavailable packages?

Message

happysmash27 · Post by **happysmash27** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 6:50 pm

For years, Portage has been failing to install things with convoluted error messages that must be traced down to some packages that are installed, but are no longer available, blocking any packages which depend on them for updating, which requires me to start adding packages to my list of packages to install one by one until it says it is not available.

Today, I decided to try to update all installed Python packages. This fails similarly; one by one, going through the list of packages, it will say, `emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "dev-python/futures"` or something like that, and it will only list that one package, not any others, requiring me to uninstall that program, then re-run the same command to find whatever the next program is unavailable. This has made me realise, that the problem the entire time, that always stops my emerge commands from running, is that one unavailable package is blocking all the others, and that is why adding more packages to my emerge command, seems to help fix things. This results in really huge commands that are hard to deal with.

There is a super nice package set that would be perfect for this, @unavailable, but I have not found any way to actually list the packages in it. If I run emerge --pretend @unavailable, it just lists that they can not be installed, one by one!

Isn't there a more efficient way to do this? Maybe if I could get some comprehensive list of all the unavailable packages on my system, I could actually update it instead of being locked in perpetual gridlock where every single update is a labour-intensive process of isolating packages one-by-one.

mike155 · Post by **mike155** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 7:34 pm

For years, Portage has been failing to install things with convoluted error messages that must be traced down to some packages that are installed, but are no longer available, blocking any packages which depend on them for updating, which requires me to start adding packages to my list of packages to install one by one until it says it is not available.

Could you give an example for an installed package that is no longer available, please?

I have used Gentoo for more than 15 years - but I've never had a package that is no longer available??? I'm afraid I don't understand what you are talking about???

Josef.95 · Post by **Josef.95** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 7:39 pm

Not sure, but I think

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emerge -pvO @unavailable

should probably list all.

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 8:04 pm

happysmash27,

That implies that you have world file pollution. There are things there that have been removed from ::gentoo, or you have not been doing --depclean as par of your maintenance, or both.
World file pollution happens when you should use --oneshot but forget.

happysmash27 · Post by **happysmash27** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 8:53 pm

NeddySeagoon wrote:happysmash27,

That implies that you have world file pollution. There are things there that have been removed from ::gentoo, or you have not been doing --depclean as par of your maintenance, or both.
World file pollution happens when you should use --oneshot but forget.

I realised I should be using --oneshot a while ago, stopped running commands without it when I should use it, and cleaned my world file some. It is still probably polluted though due to the time I did not use it.

I did NOT realise running depclean without a specific package specified was a thing one could do, however. Thank you so much for this command!! This is extremely helpful advice.

Depclean, however, fails due to required packages that could not be resolved, and says:

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 * Have you forgotten to do a complete update prior to depclean? The
 * most comprehensive command for this purpose is as follows:
 *
 *   emerge --update --newuse --deep --with-bdeps=y @world

Which does complicate things, since updating @world almost always results in at least one error along the way.

But, the next time things are updated, I will definitely run that. I am guessing it could probably solve a lot of my issues.

Post by Hu » Fri Sep 24, 2021 9:05 pm

You might (or might not) be able to make the world update go more smoothly if you clean up your world file first, either manually or via emerge --deselect. On the one hand, this will reduce the set of packages that Portage will try to update for your next @world, which may let it ignore packages that you don't need and that will trouble you. On the other hand, it will reduce the set of packages that Portage will try to update, which may cause a conflict because Portage tries to avoid upgrading this "unnecessary" package, and can only solve the dependency graph if the upgrade is performed.

You could use emerge --unmerge to remove specific named packages. However, this has minimal sanity checking, and you can carelessly remove a critical package, making the system much harder to use. The forum has plenty of threads from people who used emerge --unmerge to remove something that was vital to the toolchain, leaving the system unable to rebuild itself.

cboldt · Post by **cboldt** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:04 pm

What is a good way to figure out what packages are listed in "world" that don't need to be listed in "world"?

Not neat, and slow, and has some quirks, I used this to find packages that WOULD be removed, which suggests that they need to be in the "world" file, unless I choose to give up the functions that package provides.

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for i in `cat /var/lib/portage/world`;do emerge --depclean -p $i;done

mike155 · Post by **mike155** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:35 pm

There are some more scripts in this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1075276.html and on this page: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Vaukai/checkworldfile

I agree with Jaglovers post: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8 ... ml#8169114, but the scripts may help for an initial cleanup.

cboldt · Post by **cboldt** » Fri Sep 24, 2021 11:19 pm

Yeah - Those scripts uses emerge--depclean -p (and results do have some quirks, for example putting a specific gentoo-sources::version in world), and I see use of qdepends in there too.

Agree with you and w/jaglover. The results are a guide, use care, etc. I use lynx all the time, every day browser. By instinct thought it should be in world, but turns out it is a dependency of other programs that are on my systems. No harm if it's kept in world (I want to keep it no matter what), but it need not be there, and I get a (small) kick out of having the fewest number of entries in world.

Edit to add - this is way quicker, but takes a bit of work to interpret results:

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for i in `cat /var/lib/portage/world`;do printf "$i:\n";qdepends -Q -q $i;done

Rather than edit world by hand (not that I mind doing that), the emerge commands can remove and add, in between tests of emerge --depclean.

emerge --deselect <pacgkagename> to remove
emerge --select -n <packagename> to add. The "-n" skips recompile, assuming you haven't removed the package from the system.

Tony0945 · Post by **Tony0945** » Sat Sep 25, 2021 1:29 am

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~ $ emerge -pvO @unavailable

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:


emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "app-emulation/wine-mono:4.9.4".
(dependency required by "@unavailable" [argument])

Never heard of that target before!

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Sat Sep 25, 2021 2:37 am

The pretend output of eclean will show you installed but unavailable packages.

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eclean-dist -p -d
...
 [   11.4 G ] Total space from 1023 files would be freed in the distfiles directory

   The following unavailable installed packages were found
             games-action/dungeon-3.2.3
             sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.9.276

cboldt · Post by **cboldt** » Sat Sep 25, 2021 9:40 am

eix-test-obsolete is another tool that shows (among many other things) installed but unavailable packages.

Irre · Post by **Irre** » Sun Sep 26, 2021 6:34 am

emaint world