So today I wanted to recompile myself a new version of MPlayer, so after compiling it over, with support for some various new stuff, i tried running it……but alas, up pops an error message that says

error while loading shared libraries: libexpat.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

during compile. So, time to Google some. Turns out there’s a bug in the latest portage from Gentoo which breaks all applications running some XML Parsing libraries called Expat, so i try re-emerging Expat, no luck. Try uninstalling it, then reinstalling it, still no luck. So i seek support at the one place i know I’ll always get help when i need it, the Gentoo Forums. After some searching around i stumble upon this thread, which really explains allot of various ways of getting the system up and running again (with the one or two whines from the local newbies).

Currently I’m going trough an revdep-rebuild which requires to re-compile 39 packages, but hopefully it won’t break like it did previously, and my system will be back up and running. I’ll keep this post updated for those interested (all tough I doubt anyone but myself are, so I guess I’ll just keep it updated for my own amusement :p)

Update:
I ran

emerge fontconfig && emerge pango && emerge gtk+

which seems to have done the trick. Now I’m running

revdep-rebuild -X && emerge -uvD

which supposedly is going to update the rest of the broken dependencies.

Update 2:
Most of the builds compiled successfully, except for Audacious which is compiled from SVN, so I’ll probably have to find a way to unmerge that, or exclude it from the rebuild and get it to finish the rebuilds of packages.