Re: [gentoo-user] world favorites: pros and cons

[Neil Bothwick]

On Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:53:42 +0300, Daniel Iliev wrote:

> Neil Bothwick wrote:
> > What happens if you reboot after unmerging "c", and its absence causes
> > the system to fail to boot? What if you remove something that stops
> > emerge working?
> >
>
> Highly unlikely. For two reasons:
>
> 1) How come that I was able to boot w/o the package in question in first
> place? :)

You did have the package. ??/i mentioned rebooting after removing it, so
it was there before.

> 2) The kind of package you're talking about is listed in the system
> profile. If you try to remove such a package portage yells out a big fat
> warning.

Not necessarily, it is possible to break things with non-system packages.

> Last but not least. When it comes to redundant packages in the system.
> What happens when you do (the right way?):
>
> 1) emerge a
> 2) "a" pulls-in "b" and "c" as dependencies
> 3) emerge -C a
> 4) "a" goes out but "b" and "c" stay there just to take place
> 5) emerge --depclean
>
> Well...The first thing one can see reads:
> " *** WARNING ***  --depclean is known to be broken."
>
> So you prefer to clean the system up using procedure that is "known to
> be broken" or you just leave useless packages to take space on your
> HDDs?

That text is fairly old and hardly applies any more, at least in my
experience. As Richard mentioned, it can fall over when USE flags have
changed, but the rest of the earning, that you didn't quote, tells you to
run emerge --update --newuse --deep before using it. If you do so, your
USE flags will be consistent and it won't break things. I always use it
with --ask anyway.

> It is my opinion that Gentoo's documentation and portage's behavior
> suggest leaving junk packages on your system.
> Which indeed is "the right way"?

Only if you break the file it uses to determine which packages are junk.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Good fortune will find you provided you left clear instructions.