[gentoo-user] Re: Removing KDE 3.5? Or reason to keep it around?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 02/27/2010 07:21 AM, BRM wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----
>
>> From: Dale<rdalek1967@×××××.com>
>>> On 02/27/2010 04:15 AM, BRM wrote:
>>>>> From: Neil BothwickTo:
>>>>> (PST), BRM wrote:
>>>>>> Aside from that, I'm not sure I have ever really run "emerge
>>>>>> --depclean", but I also rarely uninstall anything, but don't
>>>>>> install things left or right to try out either, so typically
>>>>>> upgrades are all I need to do.
>>>>> You should still run --depclean as dependencies change and you
>>>>> could still have plenty of no longer needed ones installed.
>>>> Okay - so I ran "emerge --depclean -a" and got the below. I tried
>>>> running "emerge world -vuDNa" as specified, but that didn't resolve
>>>> it either.
>>>> I tried looking in the world file (/var/lib/portage/world) but didn't
>>>> find any entries that felt safe to remove.
>>> "Safe" as to what?  If something is in the world file that you didn't
>> explicitly request, then it doesn't belong there.  For example, if you have
>> "x11-libs/qt-gui" in world, you should delete it.  The world file should not
>> contain dependencies, it should only contain the stuff you emerged directly.
>
> Okay...that kind of makes more sense now.
>  From what I've read in the past, modifying 'world' would be a big no-no, and very risky - so I never touched it - also why I never really ran 'emerge --depclean', which is reporting some 400 packages to remove now that I've got that cleaned up.

emerge -C does the same.  It's just that I find it easier to edit the 
world file directly (it's just a text file, after all, no magic in 
there) if I want to clean up stuff.  If you don't want to delete 
something from world by hand, simply copy&pasting the line you want 
removed to "emerge -C <pasted line>" will have the same result.

Of course there might be special cases I simply don't know about; so 
simply emerge -C instead of removing lines from world if you want to 
play it safe.