Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Are these packages safe to unmerge?

[Toby Cubitt]

On Sat, Sep 09, 2006 at 02:26:03PM +0000, Peter wrote:
> On Sat, 09 Sep 2006 12:41:14 +0100, Mick wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Just ran depclean and the following candicates are shown:
> > =======================================
> > Calculating dependencies... done!

[snip]

> With the exception of tcsh, probably no. Run equery d {package} and see if
> anything depends on them. The ones you show are pretty standard. You might
> be able to dump the framebuffer, but check.

If depclean has listed the packages, I'm fairly sure that means
portage couldn't find anything in "system" or "world" that depends on
it (or anything that depends on something that depends on it,
etc.). So querying for dependencies is, by definition, going to return
nothing.

That doesn't necessarily mean the packages can safely be removed (I
once borked my system badly by making that assumption). Look at the
package descriptions or google them to try to find out what exactly
they do before you decide it's safe to remove them. Usually, even if
the package *is* required, all that happens is some program will no
longer run and you'll need to re-emerge the package. You can then add
it to world so that it's not picked up by depclean in the future. In
the worst case, you find you've remove something essential and the
system no longer even boots. (That's what happened to me, with libcap
if I remember right.)

That was with older versions of portage. I don't know if newer ones
are safer.

HTH,

Toby
-- 
PhD Student
Quantum Information Theory group
Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics
Garching, Germany

email: toby@××××××××.org
web: www.dr-qubit.org
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