Yesterday, Gentoo marked KDE 3.5.10 as stable on amd64. I looked for a way to upgrade all of the KDE related packages, without manually specifying each one of them. Normally one could do
emerge -avu world
but I encountered some nasty conflicts that I didn’t have time, nor will, to resolve at that time. So I’ve looked for a different solution. To my rescue came qlist for the great app-portage/portage-utils package. This package provides a set of very fast utilities to query portage. I’ve used qlist to list all of my installed packages, grep‘ed the list and piped the result as arguments to emerge using xargs.
qlist -I --nocolor | grep kde | xargs emerge -pvu1
Take a look at the package list that will be merged. If everything looks fine, then do the actual merging.
qlist -I --nocolor | grep kde | xargs sudo emerge -vu1
The --nocolor is important, or else emerge will complain about the benign looking atoms such as dev-util/kdevelop because there are invisible terminal formating characters around them.