temojen's Journal: Will the last one out please turn off the distcc cluster.

Warning!! if you run Gentoo and have not already been bitten by the expat upgrade bug, do not emerge any package that pulls in expat-2.0.1 . It will break your system. Be prepared for a multi-day revdep-rebuild during which time your system is unusable (which may not succeed), or build binary packages (of world) in a jail or on another system.

Version 2.0.1 of the XML Parsing library was recently marked stable on all architectures despite the fact that it causes a segfault in any program that is linked against expat-1 and it does not block on <expat-2.0.0 .

In the forums 1 2 and in the bug reports 1 2 the developers have made it clear that they regard this event as nescesary and desirable (to encourage people to upgrasde to the newer KDE and GNOME versions). Many have also said that this is to be expected in gentoo. Note that expat-2.0.0 did block on <expat-2.0.0, thus preventing it from being pulled in by another ebuild accidentally, and allowing anyone who needs it to go to the forums and see why it was blocked and plan their downtime.

Some users (including me) have responded by switching to other distributions; for us, continuity of service (or at least lack of unplanned downtime) is more important than slighly more flexibility than the norm.