Hello, Eli. On Sun, Feb 08, 2026 at 16:56:38 -0500, Eli Schwartz wrote: > On 2/8/26 4:17 PM, Ben Knoble wrote:
> >> php:8.2 is an old version, which I definitely don't want to emerge > >> again. Why is an updating command trying to reinstall this > >> useless old version? > >> > >> What is causing the attempted reinstallation of this package? Why > >> doesn't the command's half error message tell me? > > > > That I cannot say. You might try « equery d php:8.2 » to see what > > depends on it, or you might try « emerge -ac » to see if you can > > clean out unnecessary packages. I've cleaned up old packages highlighted by emerge -p --depclean. equery depends php:8.2 shows no packages depending on php:8.2. > Ben, if we disregard Alan's somewhat historically predictable expression > of anger it isn't at all confusing. You even pointed it out yourself to > him: it comes from "preserved-rebuild". Thanks for being so helpful. "It" may not be confusing, but I am confused. What I want to know, what I asked for in my opening post, was how to find what is causing that stale version of php to be merged in the first place. Then I could fix that cause and not have to worry about php:8.2 ever again. The unhelpful half error message from emerge -a @preserved-rebuilds doesn't tell me this. I've spent around 2 hours trying to find documentation about this, and trying to find the pertinent file which ought to be called preserved-rebuilds or @preserved-rebuilds, or something like that. If I could find this file, I might be able to see what is mis-triggering the build of php:8.2. But this file's name and location are not documented in emerge's man page, and I can't find them anywhere on the Gentoo wiki. > Preserved-rebuild shall rebuild all packages with ELF dependencies on > uninstalled packages. This remains true, even if the preserved-rebuild > package is eligible for removal via "emerge -ac". Preserved-rebuild isn't working for me at the moment. > Pedantically, you can absolutely say that running "emerge > @preserved-rebuild" and seeing it try to attempt reinstallation of > php:8.2 is a cause-and-effect relationship; the former *caused* the latter. Gee, thanks! Even the half error message told me that the error occurred because of @preserved-rebuild, as if my memory were inadequate to remember what I'd just typed in 5 seconds previously. > And yes, you are correct to advise Alan to (regularly!) run emerge -c to > clean up useless packages. I've cleaned up my orphan packages (most of them), but don't trust --depclean to do so. It still wants to remove some packages I need and want to keep. emerge -a @preserved-libs continues not to work for me. As I said, I would appreciate help in finding out what is causing emerge to want to merge php:8.2. Thanks! > -- > Eli Schwartz -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
