Re: [gentoo-user] Package management, depclean and new installs

[Wols Lists]

On 04/10/2021 07:13, Miles Malone wrote:
> I would strongly, STRONGLY discourage you from creating your own meta
> package.  There are very few meta packages in the tree (in the scheme
> of things) for very good reasons, they take one hell of a lot of
> maintenance.  They're really only there for things like kde, where you
> might just want a bare bones kde environment, or you might be
> expecting the full-fat desktop environment with all the side packages
> you'd get if you were using a distro that gave you no option out of
> the box.
>
> If you really want to group a bunch of packages into a set that gets
> emerged with one command, I would do exactly that: create a custom
> set.  Similar to @world, @system, @security, etc.  You can do that
> quite easily, see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Package_sets .
>
> But really there's not a lot of use cases for it, mostly if you use a
> package and it's not just a dep of something (or several things) you
> should just have it in your world file, *for most people's use cases*.
> Going through your world file and cleaning out cruft is a part of
> regular gentoo maintenance, should be done at a minimum annually imo.
> Much like cleaning out distfiles and whatnot (see eclean, from
> app-portage/gentoolkit.  And, indeed, pretty much every other useful
> utility in gentoolkit.  Also flaggie for use-flag management.)
>
Yup. Emerge the packages you want, let portage take care of the rest. 
And I've recently joined the group who let emerge default to --oneshot, 
and use --select if I want to keep it ... :-)

And do learn how to use package.use. Don't clutter your make.conf with 
loads of flags you don't understand (or want), just to get packages to 
emerge. I use autounmask-write if I need to, then I DON'T let etc-update 
update some huge package.use file. I just rename the new bunch of flags 
into package.use/what-ive-just-emerged.date. That way, if I know I still 
want that program, I let the file accumulate cruft :-), and if I'm 
wondering what the hell it is or it looks outdated as heck, I just 
carefully delete them one by one, and see what happens.

One last tip for a newbie - have you already got X, harfbuzz, and 
freetype installed? If not, squirrel this info away until you need it - 
harfbuzz often won't install because freetype isn't there. But freetype 
won't install because harfbuzz isn't there! Find out what's pulling them 
both in, do an emerge -C on that, then install either harfbuzz or 
freetype with USE="-theother". Then an emerge --update should clean up 
the mess :-)

Cheers,
Wol