On 2026-02-09, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Eli.
>
> On Sun, Feb 08, 2026 at 19:29:04 -0500, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>> On 2/8/26 6:42 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>
>> > 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.
If you can't get a dependency relation in output with -tv, then it's
being pulled as part of @preserved-rebuilds.
[...]
>
> I think I know now what the cause of my problems is. The ebuild file for
> dev-libs/php-8.2.28-r1 had been removed (probably by emerge --sync)
> despite there still being a package (media-libs/libvpx) using it. This
> may be a bug in portage, I'm not sure.
>
> When I try # USE='-avif -webp' emerge -pqeO @preserved-rebuild (following
> the directions in the sets page of the wiki), I get
>
> [ebuild U ] dev-lang/php-8.2.30 [8.2.28-r1]
>
> .. When I follow up with # equery depends dev-lang/php-8.2.28-r1, I get
>
> * These packages depend on dev-lang/php-8.2.28-r1:
> media-libs/libvpx-1.15.2 (doc ? dev-lang/php)
>
> .. There is something funny, here. libvpx never had the doc USE flag, so
> why does it want php? Also, in the last day or so, I've rebuilt libvpx
> which now "uses" php-8.3.29 (for some value of "uses").
Wasn't the way to check for reverse dependencies affecting the graph of
installed packages
emerge -pvc atom
?
> So, the question remains, why is emerge @preserved-rebuild trying to
> merge php-8.2.30? Nothing uses it.
Because it is installed.
If you don't need this package and emerge -pvc shows nothing requiring
it, maybe you can just remove it (e.g. with emerge -avc)?
--
Nuno Silva
