Re: [gentoo-user] --depclean wants to remove openrc. Yikes!

[Dale]

tastytea wrote:
> On 2021-07-25 13:26+0100 Wols Lists <antlists@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 25/07/21 12:47, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>>>> They are, @system is a set of packages and nothing it it will be
>>>>> depcleaned. However, openrc is not part of @system, the virtual
>>>>> is.
>>> Ah, that's it.  So we have critical system packages which aren't
>>> part of @system.  I think openrc is a critical system package.
>>>
>> Well, it's not installed on my new system. I doubt it's installed on
>> any new-ish gentoo-gnome systems. So openrc itself can't be critical.
>>
>> It may be critical for *your* system ... :-)
>>
>> Let's rephrase it - "openrc is one of the (optional) packages that
>> satisfied a critical dependency". Your problem is caused because you
>> have explicitly installed an alternate package that satisfies the same
>> critical dependency.
> Maybe OpenRC should come pre-recorded into @world on profiles that
> default to it. If I switch to another init system I can explicitly
> uninstall OpenRC. Forgetting to uninstall it is no big deal.
> Accidentally uninstalling it makes my system unbootable.
>


From my understanding, nothing should be in @world by default.  The bare
necessities are in @system and what the user installs is in @world.  I
haven't downloaded a starge3 tarball in ages to look but I'm pretty sure
the world file comes empty. 

The problem here is that a user installed a package outside of
emerge/portage's knowledge.  At that point, the user is responsible for
making sure what that package depends on is installed, at the correct
version etc etc.  Since emerge/portage has no knowledge of the package,
it can't making decisions about that package or what it depends on. 

Neil did post a good solution tho.  It's easy enough and will at least
tell emerge/portage that the packages are needed even if it doesn't know
why. 

Dale

:-)  :-)