Re: [gentoo-user] Is it sefe to unmerge?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 13 February 2008, Sergey Kobzar wrote:
> Hi
>
> 'emerge -pv --depclean' shows that these packages may be unmerged:
<snip detail>
>  app-crypt/hashalot
>  sys-libs/pwdb
>  sys-apps/attr
>
> Is it safe to remove they from the system? This is mail server and
> has mostly no additional packages except exim, mysql, spamassassin
> and some other.

This means that you never explicitly merged them, they are not in world 
and are no longer required by anything else. There are normally three 
reasons:

- you merged something that needed these packages, then unmerged them 
later, leaving these dependencies orphaned
- you merged something else that used them, and in a recent update they 
are now using something else that provides the same functionality
- they were required by some USE flag you once had, and you have now 
changed your USE, so the deps are no longer required.

You'll need to look at each package and figure out if YOU need them, as 
we can't tell you that. I might think that you don't need your wife 
under any circumstances, and you might strongly disagree :-)

I once knew what hashalot does. I forgot. It's something to do with 
cryptography
pwdb is used as a password and user account configuration thingy. Looks 
pretty important :-)
attr provides extended attributes to ext2/3 and XFS file systems, used 
by selinux and posix capabilities. If you use these features, you 
already are aware of it.

When you figure out which ones to keep, it's best to put them in your 
world file. Either edit /var/lib/portage/world and stick the name at 
the end, or run 'emerge -n <package-name>'

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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