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

[Richard Fish]

On 9/9/06, Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 10 September 2006 00:09, Toby Cubitt wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Actually, for some of them equery did find dependencies - so I left them well
> alone.  For a few of these it did not, in which case I unmerged them.

equery depends is broken and unreliable.  The fact that they appear in
depclean gives you some reasonable assurance that you can remove them.

The only one of your entries that gives me pause is the evdev driver,
which would be useful for multi-button USB mice or joysticks.  If you
use a /dev/input/eventX device in your xorg.conf, you should keep this
around.

-Richard


>
> > 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.)
>
> I'll keep an eye out for dependency related breakages and no doubt repost if I
> get lost (it happens rather often lately!  ;-)
>
> Thank you all for your help and guidance.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Mick
>
>
>
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