Philip Webb <purslow@...> posted
20090520061752.GA4750@..., excerpted below, on  Wed, 20 May 2009
02:17:52 -0400:

> The dir belongs to Dbus
> 
> root:509 xinitrc.d> equery belongs /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
> [ Searching for file(s) /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d in *... ]
> sys-apps/dbus-1.2.3-r1 (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d)

Yes, but note how dirs in general "belong" to packages.  Unlike files and 
file collision, dirs don't collide, they're simply shared.

Try equery b /usr/share/doc for instance... or in a more directly 
parallel to our current dir comparison, /etc/init.d .

The idea is that when a package owning a dir is removed, if the dir is 
empty, it too is removed.  That's also why certain system dirs have 
.keep-<pkg> files in them, so they won't be removed as empty dirs until 
that package is removed.

This behavior is actually very handy in some cases, tho.  It's easy to 
determine how many packages have contents in a particular directory  
without equerying every file therein.  Especially for long lasting 
installations that have been continuously upgraded for years, with 
portage's behavior on owned and orphaned files changing a bit over the 
years, it's possible various obscure dirs will have content the user 
doesn't remember putting there and no package owns.  I expect there'll be 
several files left over in /usr/kde/3.5 when I finally remove it, for 
instance, and being able to confirm for sure that no packages own the dir 
any more, or finding the stray KDE 3.5 packages I didn't remove and still 
need to, can be very useful before I actually manually delete the 
directory and any remaining content itself.  This was certainly the case 
with /usr/kde/3.4 I know, as I remember cleaning it up.

So, just because dbus owns the dir doesn't mean a thing, in terms of 
whether other packages can own and put stuff in it too.  Note that I 
really don't know much bout /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d and its purposes.  
I'm just saying that you can't use the fact that it currently just 
happens to belong to dbus, to assume that it's dbus specific.  It's quite 
possible other packages could make use of it too, but don't on your 
system, either because it's a new feature nothing else is using yet, or 
because you simply don't have merged any of the other packages that make 
use of it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman