Re: [gentoo-user] Uninstalling KDE packages

[Albert Hopkins]

On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 22:46 +0200, Vlad Dogaru wrote:
> Hello,
>
> after some suggestions from the list I finally emerged KDE to give it
> another try. Even with 256 MiB of RAM, it works quite acceptably, save
> for the startup time. However, I notice it has installed all sorts of
> marginally useful and ultimately resource consuming software such as
> KWallet. Now, I realise the risks of keeping passwords scattered all
> around (sometimes even unencrypted), but in my environment it's not
> that great a priority.
>
> I would like to know if unmerging KWallet (also the eduitainment suite
> and possibly even Kopette and Konqueror) is safe. How can I tell for
> other packages? Is emerge --unmerge enough or do other measures have
> to be taken? Also, in the case of a fresh install, how can I choose
> what KDE installs? Do I have to run emerge kde, or would kdelibs,
> kdebase, etc (along with their dependencies of course) suffice?

Here's my opinion about the whole thing (note that I don't use KDE so
this is an opinion in general).  If you don't like something, don't use
it.  If you don't like the edutainment stuff, don't run any of those
programs and you don't be using any resources.  If you don't want to use
KWallet then don't run it.  If it's running in the background or
something then that means that something that you *are* using depends on
KWallet and that's probably something you don't want to unmerge.

Yeah, you could go around experimenting with unmerging packages, but you
will likely find that a) these packages will get re-merged on the next
install/update, b) you will break some program that depends on that
package which the end result is c) you will waste way too much
time/energy debugging a. & b.

You can also manipulate USE flags to disable various (optional) features
of packages.

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