Gentoo makes Perl upgrades easy
Perl upgrades on Gentoo Linux have been laborious for me in the past, but with Perl 5.24 that was no longer the case. I’ve previously managed Perl upgrades by using the oneshot option and manually resolving any remaining conflicts afterwards. With this upgrade though, it looked to be close enough so I decided to try with the backtrack option as suggested from the following output.
Portage reporting a slot conflict with the Perl upgrade (no hard blocks).
After adding the backtrack option Portage happily resolved all dependencies and proceeded with the upgrade.
--backtrack=COUNT Specifies an integer number of times to backtrack if dependency calculation fails due to a conflict or an unsatisfied dependency (default: '3').
Perl packages ready to be merged after adding the backtrack option.
It’s likely that the Gentoo developers have added a few improvements to this process as the official way of upgrading Perl on Gentoo is now by using the backtrack option. Any mentioning of doing a oneshot with Perl upgrades has been removed from the Wiki.
Whatever they did works for me :-)