Perl upgrade advise for Gentoo users!

[Gordon]

On April 6, 2017 there was a change in the portage tree that will cause your B3 to want to upgrade perl to (currently unstable) version 5.24. This appears to be a mistake that only affects ARM based systems (so Bubba|2 users will be safe). My advice to you all is to hold back on syncing until this issue is resolved.

Gordon

[Gordon]

A follow-up on this issue.

Perl 5.24 is being rolled out as stable, so no mistake though it is confusing that the devs are changing keywords in existing ebuilds. The problem with perl 5.24 is that the upgrade is very troublesome and it is also near impossible to mask it. The suggested method to upgrade is to use the following emerge command:

Code: Select all

emerge -1auND --backtrack=300 --with-bdeps=y @world

I ran this command on one of my B3s and it passed. It did take between 2.5 and 3 hours just to calculate dependencies though.

An alternative method is to simply upgrade perl with the --nodeps emerge option, which some will tell you is bad advice but does save a lot of time. As perl-core modules can cause conflicts later on you should uninstall them before running perl-cleaner. Any one that is still required will automatically be pulled in by perl-cleaner.The command sequence thus becomes:

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emerge -1a --nodeps perl
emerge -aC perl-core/*
perl-cleaner --all -- -a

note the '-a' (--ask) on each command line: you want to be able to investigate what is being build before accepting it.

[andy_b2_user]

Hi Gordon.

To late my B2 has updated.

b2 ~ # perl -v

This is perl 5, version 24, subversion 1 (v5.24.1) built for powerpc-linux-thread-multi
(with 31 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2017, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl". If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.

b2 ~ #
[/quote

Andy

[sakaki]

Hi Andy -

as Gordon noted in his original post:

This appears to be a mistake that only affects ARM based systems (so Bubba|2 users will be safe).

The B2 is a 32-bit powerpc (ppc) based system, not ARM, so this mix-up in the Gentoo tree never affected your system. In any event, dev-lang/perl-5.24.1-r1 is (now) marked stable on both arm and ppc.

Also, genup will have done all the necessary perl-cleaner housework for you after installing the dev-lang/perl-5.24.1-r1 binary package, so in short, your system should be fine.

Best, sakaki

[Gordon]

Hi Sakaki,

Well, it started with ARM but they are gradually removing the '~' from all the other platforms as well. Today it was alpha that changed to stable. The main problem with this upgrade is that it is near impossible to stop it, while at the same time installed apps that have a dependency on perl 5.22 can cause portage to want to pull the older perl back in again and result in an endless conflict.

It *should* be okay if you only have packages installed from the official portage tree - i.e. no perl dependencies from overlays.

[sakaki]

Hi Gordon - haven't seen any issues with it yet on ppc or arm64 on Gentoo. Just recently removed the package.mask entry for this on my Gentoo B3s, seems ok but will keep an eye on it.
Best, sakaki

[Gordon]

Hi Sakaki,

Well the thing is I masked it because my LMS binary did not have the necessary 5.24 components in it yet and portage told me to unmask it. So then I changed the keywords and portage told me to add perl 5.24 to accept_keywords. Apparently the way to block it is to mask all virtuals that want to pull in 5.24 but IMO that's insane. I have not tried whether that actually works.