For reasons unclear to me, Gentoo merged the “ss” and “com_err” packages into e2fsprogs-libs. Unfortunately portage could not deal with the conflicting packages and people updating are now caught by some blocked packages. Fortunately this is fairly easy to fix as long as you are careful and do the update in a single session.

First you need to make sure that your portage tree and emerge are up to date.

emerge –sync
emerge emerge

Next you will want to check for the blocked packages.
emerge –pretend –update world

If you see the following blocks you will need to follow the somewhat scary procedure. It is scary because you can easily lock your self out, possibly forcing a reinstall at the console.

[blocks B ] sys-libs/ss (is blocking sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.2)
[blocks B ] sys -fs/e2fsprogs-1.41 (is blocking sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.2)
[blocks B ] sys-libs/com_err (is blocking sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.2)
[blocks B ] sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs (is blocking sys-libs/ss-1.40.9, sys-libs/com_err-1.40.9)

In order to fix this you MUST first, fetch all the sources needed to update the world.
emerge -auDNv –fetchonly world

Now for the scary part where you unmerge the packages, and hope that you do not drop your connection.
emerge -C ss com_err e2fsprogs

Install the correct packages.
emerge -auDNv e2fsprogs-libs e2fsprogs

Continue with a normal update of the world.
emerge –update world

1. 

   Pawel

   June 7, 2009 at 2:25 pm

   sudo emerge -auDNv e2sfprogs-libs e2sfprogs
   sudo: error while loading shared libraries: libcom_err.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   great.. any emerge operation leads me to such error O_o