On 11/10/2023 21:14, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 4:49 PM Michael Cook <mackal.cook@gmail.com 
> <mailto:mackal.cook@gmail.com>> wrote:
>     I just --backtrack=100 and walked away, seemed to have figured
>     something out for my system and updated normally.
> 
> This is the one that solved it. Been away too long, forgot all about 
> backtrack

I've had this in my make.conf for many years now:

   EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--backtrack=200"

Never hit the issue you described (KDE desktop, thus Qt is always a dep.)