When I first start using emerge, I could not understand some of the behaviour of this tool. For example, when I tried to emerge OpenOffice…
kranpak root # emerge -p openoffice
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] net-print/cups-1.1.18-r4
[ebuild N ] app-shells/tcsh-6.12-r2
[ebuild N ] app-office/openoffice-1.0.3-r1
And then I tried…
kranpak root # emerge -pu openoffice
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] app-shells/tcsh-6.12-r2
[ebuild N ] net-print/cups-1.1.18-r4
[ebuild U ] x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9 [3.0.4]
[ebuild U ] dev-libs/expat-1.95.6-r1 [1.95.4]
[ebuild U ] media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.0-r2 [2.1]
[ebuild U ] x11-base/xfree-4.3.0-r2 [4.2.1-r2]
[ebuild N ] app-office/openoffice-1.0.3-r1
Why the difference? Is there any thing wrong? What is the difference between installing OpenOffice and updating it?
Well, here goes an explanation (thanks to spider from gentoo)…
The -pu option will check dependencies downwards from OpenOffice (as it should) and since you are updating it will note you have an older version than the currently available one, and update each package on its way down into the tree.
The “install” will only make sure you have at least the least possible version for satisfaction, not update them.