On Thursday, 31 July 2025 12:28:54 British Summer Time Philip Webb wrote: > 250730 Eli Schwartz wrote: > > On 7/30/25 4:50 AM, Philip Webb wrote: > >> Yes, that's the explanation for the problem. > >> It comes back that I encountered it before some years ago > >> & chose to enable 'su' for 'util-linux'. > >> I've now added lines in 'package.use' to set the flag appropriately > >> & have successfully updated both pkgs. > >> However, I continue to believe that Portage could do a better job > >> in reporting the nature of the problem. > > > > I agree! :) I believe this is a known issue, > > which I reported at https://bugs.gentoo.org/916462 > > Portage's error message wording isn't always the best, > > it would be very nice if it could be improved. > > Finally, some support for common sense !
The difficulty with the output of emerge is it requires interpreting various symbols, which the user have to familiarise themselves with, but also provides little additional explanation as to the underlying causes. Yes, it may be obvious there is clash caused by some USE flag, but why might that be? An upstream change? A prior user edit now incompatible with some build-time dependency? Some hard-coded dependency you now have to live with, if you want to update a package? Additional information to this effect would save time fishing around in ebuilds and upstream bug reports, trying to invent workarounds and creating noise in BGO.
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