Today I was battling with my system again, in my attempt to make my dvd drive automount. At one point, I needed to recompile my system, to allow a new use flag to be compiled into my system. Too bad I hit an error, specifically ERROR: dev-python/libgnomecanvas-python-2.28.0 failed:. This error prevented anything else from being able to compile.

After doing some research, I discovered that an unstable package for libpng12.so had gotten into the stable packages for Gentoo rendering many things unable to compile. A little more reading revealed that running the script /usr/sbin/libpng-1.4.x-update.sh would fix the problem. To be honest, I don’t follow what happened here. I especially don’t understand why the script to fix the problem would be included, rather than just fixing the problem - unless the problem is specific to only some systems? However, sure enough, now when I run emerge --update --deep --newuse world to recompile my system, it runs (at least it hasn’t hit an error yet, but then, it is still running).

Anyway, if anyone runs into the same problem, the script should fix it.

Here’s the link to where I found the solution.

http://www.listware.net/201006/gentoo-user/103617-gentoo-user-emerge-preserved-rebuild-failure.html

UPDATE: Fixing this problem not only allowed the system to be updated, but also allowed me to install a newer version of VLC (which I tried to install yesterday, and failed a number of times) and also lead to me being able to install an up-to-date version of gpodder (full details of how to do this soon).