Re: [gentoo-user] baselayout2/openrc question

[Dale]

Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 21:29:30 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>
>>> Taken more globally, maybe portage should warn whenever you are
>>> trying to remove a package that is a dependency of anything in
>>> @world.
>>>
>>
>> Could be useful if implemented with an off switch
>>
>> Or leave it off by default, users can enable it in make.conf if they
>> wish. I often unmerge deps of things in world, but I know (usually)
>> what I'm doing and will follow up with a --deep later. Annoying "Are
>> you sure?" "Are you REALLY sure?" might make me switch to Ubuntu :-)
>>
>
> A command line argument (--force?) would be fine, but you can't complain
> it's annoying when you have just complained that portage doesn't do this.
> Either you want to be able to shoot yourself in the foot or you don't.
>
>

I agree with this.  I like the idea of --force.  It would let portage 
know that you are aware of what you are doing.  Thing is, sometimes new 
people remove python and they don't know YET that portage has to have 
python.  They find that out afterwards. 

Thing is, if you try to unmerge portage, it will tell you it will break 
stuff.  Removing portage can be recovered from easily.  We don't really 
need a warning for that.  You just untar the thing and carry on.  
Removing python is not that simple unless you happen to have a binary 
saved.  The bad thing is, since python is not a "system" package, it 
doesn't even save the last compiled binary in /usr/portage/packages/All/ 
if you only have buildsyspkg in make.conf.  It does portage but not 
python.  If you want to have python saved, you have to do it manually or 
set buildpkg in make.conf which will save a copy of EVERYTHING.  That 
would include the world packages as well.

I seriously doubt the devs will change any of this anytime soon tho.  
This is pretty much a mute point.

Dale

:-)  :-)