Re: [gentoo-user] Is it OK to get rid of app-alternatives/* ?

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 9:10 AM Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o> wrote:
>
> On 2023-02-15 08:11:46, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> >
> > If, as you say, it will eventually replace eselect, there is no more
> > bloat, just different bloat. It's still just a bunch of symlinks, but
> > managed differently.
> >
>
> Should be less, since you already have portage installed but not
> necessarily eselect-whatever.
>

The symlinks are all associated with packages as well, which means
that when you uninstall things that will get rid of the symlinks as
well.  This is really just a best practice all-around.  I have a
Gentoo system I've been maintaining for a while and I occasionally
find orphaned stuff poking around because of special cases of things
that weren't managed by the package manager, and so when things were
obsoleted they stuck around.

The news is needed precisely because the migration involves having the
package manager install a bunch of stuff over files not owned by any
package.  That triggers a warning, but only because the files were in
a less than ideal state to start.

Things like this and the new user/group packages also reduce the
complexity of dependency management because they just turn everything
into a package dependency.  Less special cases.

-- 
Rich