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

[Arve Barsnes]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 at 05:30, <coalml@××××.io> wrote:
>
> Hi y'all new confused user regarding package management
>
> How do you guys manage and protect your packages?
> Do you just put everything on world and end up with a huge world file?
> Do you have basic system files on world and the rest you protect or omit?
> Do you create new(personalised) files depending on category and somehow link them in any of the above 3?

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking about when you say
'protect' here? As cal said, putting the actual programs you use in
world is the way to go, and portage will take care of dependencies for
you. Putting more than needed in world can sometimes confuse portage
to the point where you could have problems that can be annoying to
troubleshoot.

> It's just emerging everything you are not sure you will keep with -1 seems cumbersome to me especially if at some point I want to transfer to a new device and want to copy my settings over ,select what to keep and discard the rest,depcleaning with pretend all the time seems annoying on the long term as well so there should be lots of different solutions from different people(at least thats what I think)

As you can see from the two earlier replies, from cal and Dale, this
depends on how you want to manage your system. If you do a lot of
installing, putting -1 in your defaults might be the way to go, but
personally I'm in cal's camp, I would much rather remember the -1 when
I'm doing something ad hoc, and have any programs I want added to
world without adding another flag to my emerge command.

As for depclean, I have added an alias for depclean with --pretend
that I use after world updates. Unless you have installed something
with -1, most of the time that list is empty. And the output gives
nice clean lists of what packages it wants to remove, with exact
version strings and slots, so if I agree, I just do 'emerge -C <copied
list>' and I'm good to go.

Cheers,
Arve