unix: March 2005 archives


Oh Portage, You Blow

[ rakaur on Wed Mar 02 at 07:03 AM // category: software, technology, unix ]

It sure would be nice if the Gentoo Portage maintainers only managed to fuck something up every other time they update some random ebuild whose failure to compile fucks over my entire system.

I swear to god I’m so sick of going to update (emerge -Dau world) and having it fail on the first or second build with some nonsensical error that results from the inept assholes over at Gentoo. The latest version of GTK has had a compile error ever since they put it in Portage, but do they fix it, fuck no. A whole shitload of things need GTK to build, and with the -D (—deep) flag on it’ll update the library before it updates the programs that use it.

Just a few minutes ago I was upgrading to the latest Portage revision (that’s bullshit too, but I’ll get to that in a second) of beep-media-player. It gets finished, I load bmp, and it gives me an error about not being able to play the song. Apparently, for some widely unknown reason, they decided to remove mp3 support by default (prententious ogg-using cocksuckers) so now I have to rebuild it AGAIN with USE="mp3". Oh, but wait, there’s a compile error in that! It tries to link to a hard coded version of the standard C++ library in /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.4/. But wait, I have gcc 3.3.5, so there’s no 3.3.4 folder, but that’s where it looks anyway, because it’s apparently HARD FUCKING CODED. The only simple way to fix this was for me to symlink 3.3.4 to 3.3.5, which worked.

And that brings me to the Portage revision numbers (the -rN at the end of version numbers). They up this number when they make a revision to the ebuild itself, while nothing actually happens to the program that would in any way concern me with updating it. It’s always nice when there’s a new Portage revision of, say, OpenOffice, and Portage decides to spend a full 24 hours upgrading it when there’s no fucking point.

It’s pretty damn bad when the maintainers of the OS can’t get something right and I have to put cheap hacks all over the place to get my system to run properly.

This is going to be a rant soon.

-- rakaur // 2005.03.02 @ 07:03 AM

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