On Thursday 03 November 2005 01:52, Sebastian Redl wrote:
> Duncan wrote:
> >What depclean does is starting from your world file (and including stuff
> >in your system profile that's not specifically listed in the world file),
> >figure out what each package listed there needs to RUN (run-time
> >dependencies, as opposed to compile-time dependencies), BASED ON CURRENT
> >USE FLAGS, then unmerge other packages as unnecessary.
>
> Actually, that's not 100% correct. If that was so, depclean would never
> remove system packages.
>  But it does. On my setup, which is purely udev, depclean wants to
> remove devfsd. It warns me that it wants to remove the system package,
> but it would do it anyway.

devfsd and udev are responsible for managing the /dev filesystem so the system 
profile needs a package that fills this requirement.

# grep dev-manager /usr/portage/profiles/base/packages
virtual/dev-manager

The gentoo developers decided to make this system requirement depend on a 
virtual so the profile becomes more flexible.

# grep dev-manager /usr/portage/profiles/base/virtuals
virtual/dev-manager			sys-fs/udev

And there we have it, the Gentoo developers have decided they want udev to be 
responsible for managing the /dev filesystem. So we can conclude:
1. devfsd is obsolete and replaced by udev
2. if udev is installed (which it should) then the system profiles requirement 
for a dev-manager has been filled
3. devfsd is no longer required for the system profile and can be removed

Why do I get the warning about unmerging a system package?
Because devfsd still provides virtual/dev-manager, virtual/dev-manager is 
still part of the system profile. So even though Gentoo favors udev over 
devfsd, devfsd still provides functionality that the system profile requires. 
And that's why you get that message.

Note: You can safely unmerge devfsd as long as you've got RC_DEVICES set to 
"auto" or "udev" in /etc/conf.d/rc
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