Revdep-rebuild not really fixing anything

[jsmaye]

Running revdep-rebuild yields a number of broken links. I had originally thought that just running revdep-rebuild would fix them, but apparently not - the same errors on consecutive runs show up. Am I wrong in thinking that revdep-rebuild <rebuilds> the dependancies? If not, what does?

[lnxz]

It's supposed to give you a list of packages to rebuild, it doesn't really fix anything by itself.

[Aysen]

Running revdep-rebuild yields a number of broken links. I had originally thought that just running revdep-rebuild would fix them, but apparently not - the same errors on consecutive runs show up. Am I wrong in thinking that revdep-rebuild <rebuilds> the dependancies? If not, what does?

Yep, it rebuilds packages with broken binaries.

However, it may happen that when you update or unmerge a package, some of its files are left over. This can happen under some circumstances (after you use fix_libtool_files.sh, for example). So, such files are junk from your point of view, but revdep-rebuild thinks they're needed, and when they have some broken links, it wants to rebuild them. But it can't rebuild anything, because the package is no longer installed. It's generally safe to delete them manually. To be on the safe side, do a

Code: Select all

equery belongs <filename>

for every file it reports. If a file doesn't belong to any package, delete it and your problem is gone.

[jsmaye]

Well, now, which is it? I've gotten two contradictory replies.

Does revdep-rebuild fix the errors it finds or do I?

[RazielFMX]

Well, now, which is it? I've gotten two contradictory replies.

Does revdep-rebuild fix the errors it finds or do I?

It depends. It will try to fix what it can.

I saw a similair issue once, it turns out there were some files ~/.rev* that I had to remove. Then I reran revdep-rebuild, resolving the issues.

[sageman]

Revdep-rebuild will try to re-emerge packages to fix broken binaries. However, if those binaries belong to packages which have alreadly been unmerged, or, packages which no longer are in portage, it will fail.

I use revdep-rebuild to find what is reported as "broken". These "broken" files, I then run through equery belongs, and if they don't belong to anything, I delete them.

I never just run revdep-rebuild, it's always with "--pretend", and I look at the ~/.revdep* files to diagnosis what's going on.

[RazielFMX]

Revdep-rebuild will try to re-emerge packages to fix broken binaries. However, if those binaries belong to packages which have alreadly been unmerged, or, packages which no longer are in portage, it will fail.

I use revdep-rebuild to find what is reported as "broken". These "broken" files, I then run through equery belongs, and if they don't belong to anything, I delete them.

I never just run revdep-rebuild, it's always with "--pretend", and I look at the ~/.revdep* files to diagnosis what's going on.

As do I, especially during large updates, or after a particularly nasty --depclean.

[Carlo]

Does revdep-rebuild fix the errors it finds or do I?

Depends. The script itself is a workaround for missing reverse dependency support of Portage and as that it's not perfect. And Portage won't uninstall files it once has installed, but have been touched in between. Also symlinks were not uninstalled on unmerging with older versions.

Checking broken symlinks and comparing them with /var/db/pkg/*/*/CONTENTS to find out if a broken symlink was installed by some ebuild, so it's worth to file a bug, or if they're are just left over and can be cleaned out should not be the problem.