On Sunday, 27 July 2025 11:46:44 British Summer Time Philip Webb wrote:

250726 Michael wrote:

Hi Philip, Did you get to the bottom of this problem ?

Yes, but only after your kind concern galvanised me to tackle it (smile).
I realised what the basic problem was, but have been distracted otherwise.

It seems to me some dependencies got muddled up and you've ended up with Qt5 as a dependency of Plasma-KDE plus Qt6, stepping over each other's toes. I'm guessing something in either /var/lib/portage/world
or /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/ kept Qt5 behind.

Checking back thro' my notes, I saw that I lost both KDE + sound
after a power outage 250617 Tu, which forced a reboot.
Checking 'syslog', I found the previous 'restart' 250525.
Next, I looked at 'emerge.log' & listed all pkgs updated during the interval : these included 'xorg-server' + 'clementine' (sound),
so something else was needed to make the new versions work properly.
Then, I looked at my own 'pkg.ref' file (see below),
which lists all my installed pkgs with notes re the pkgs which require them
; that told me which other pkgs probably needed to be updated too
to restore KDE + sound. I duly remerged them & it's all back where it sb !

I've run into this before, eg re sound, but not so severely.
It's a defect in Portage, which no-one seems to want to acknowledge :
it will happily update a pkg without including its vital requirements.

This is not a problem I've come across. Portage processes the tree of dependencies and emerges/updates what it needs in an agreeable order. If some dependency of any package to a newly updated library is broken, then you get a warning printed at the end of the emerge to run @preserved-rebuild. The affected package which might have been temporarily affected will be rebuilt
and normal operations will be restored.

If the user has specified some particular package version or library version, then portage will try to work around it, if it is possible, but can't override user instructions to make it happen.

I was able to solve the problem with the help of 'pkg.ref',
my own invention long ago (I've been using Gentoo since 2003).
Here is an extract, listing all 'media-libs' pkgs which are installed :

230717 media-libs/a52dec-0.7.4-r8 [for vlc]
250427 media-libs/alsa-lib-1.2.13-r3 [for FF]
230717 media-libs/alsa-topology-conf-1.2.5.1 [for alsa-lib]
230717 media-libs/alsa-ucm-conf-1.2.8 [for alsa-lib]
250727 media-libs/chromaprint-1.5.1-r4 [for clementine]
250427 media-libs/dav1d-1.5.0 [for FF]
250727 media-libs/faad2-2.11.1 [for clementine]
250713 media-libs/fontconfig-2.16.2-r1 [for libXft]
240714 media-libs/freeglut-3.6.0 [for mupdf]
250514 media-libs/freetype-2.13.3 [for libXft]
230718 media-libs/giflib-5.2.1-r1 [for imlib2 mplayer qt]
240316 media-libs/glm-1.0.1 [for LO]
230625 media-libs/glu-9.0.2 [for virtual]
250713 media-libs/harfbuzz-11.2.1 [for pango : USE ]
240921 media-libs/imlib2-1.12.3 [for feh]
241005 media-libs/jbig2dec-0.20 [for ghostscript-gpl]
250427 media-libs/lcms-2.17-r2 [for ghostscript-gpl]
230304 media-libs/lensfun-0.3.2-r1 [for ufraw]
250308 media-libs/libaom-3.10.0 [for FF]
250427 media-libs/libass-0.17.1-r2 [for ffmpeg]
230726 media-libs/libcanberra-0.30-r7 [for FF]
241006 media-libs/libcdr-0.1.7 [for LO]
241006 media-libs/libepoxy-1.5.10-r3 [for poppler]
230625 media-libs/libexif-0.6.24 [for fbida]
230727 media-libs/libfreehand-0.1.2-r1 [for LO]
250727 media-libs/libglvnd-1.7.0 [for mesa xorg-server]
230719 media-libs/libid3tag-0.16.2 [for imlib2]
250308 media-libs/libjpeg-turbo-3.1.0 [for v/jpeg]
230727 media-libs/libpagemaker-0.0.4-r1 [for LO]
250727 media-libs/libpng-1.6.47 [for xorg]
240902 media-libs/libva-2.22.0 [for mesa]
241006 media-libs/libvisio-0.1.7 [for LO]
241013 media-libs/libvpx-1.14.1 [for FF]
241006 media-libs/libzmf-0.0.2-r1 [for LO]
250727 media-libs/mesa-25.0.7 [for xorg-server : USE]
250224 media-libs/openh264-2.6.0 [for FF]
230713 media-libs/openjpeg-2.5.0-r5 [for ghostscript-gpl mupdf]
240917 media-libs/pcaudiolib-1.2-r2
241006 media-libs/raptor-2.0.16 [for redland]
250727 media-libs/taglib-2.1.1 [for clementine]
250301 media-libs/tiff-4.7.0-r1 [for okular cups ghostscript]
230717 media-libs/xvid-1.3.7-r1 [for ffmpeg vlc]

KDE + Xfce has separate lists (pkg-kde.ref pkg-xfce.ref).

You will see that some have today's date 250727, eg Chromaprint,
one or more of which proved to be essential for restoring sound.

No, Portage doesn't do it all for you ! -- it presents long lists of blocks. Currently, it's doing this with 'curl' + 'shadow'.

A hard Block "B" indicates a conflict between what packages/versions you have installed or specified and what portage seeks to install/update. This
requires manual intervention by the user to be resolved, typically be editing any user additions in /etc/portage/. A soft block "b" is resolvable by
portage alone.

Either way, portage will install what you've told it you want on your system and generally will do so quite reliably. Normally, there is no good reason at all to be installing libraries manually, or sticking them in your /var/lib/ portage/world, unless you are trying some temporary workaround.

Some packages may require a reboot, or restart, for a recently emerged version to be loaded and used. Kernel, graphics, audio, pam, etc., would be such a case. If you do not reboot often, or manually restart affected packages, you'll come up against some components of a desktop failing to work as expected.

Today, I encountered a demand for a USE flag '!gnutls' -- NB the '!' :
what does that mean ? 'USE="gnutls"' makes no difference
& there's no explanation of '!' via 'man emerge'.

An exclamation mark "!" before an item denotes a negation. You'd normally see this when emerge informs you it cannot emerge a package with the USE flags you have currently specified for some package in /etc/portage/package.use/*, or your default USE flags in /etc/portage/make.conf. I think a couple of
packages have a hard dependency on USE="gnutls", so if you have disabled
gnutls globally for the more widely adopted USE="openssl", you'd receive a warning by emerge about this.

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