[gentoo-user] A Gentoo Enema

[Tom Eastman]

Hey all,

Sorry about any imagery conjured up by the subject line... I've been
running the same gentoo system on my computer for several years now...
keeping it relativey updated, but over time there's always cruft that
builds up, stuff that gets left behind during upgrades, or re-installs.
   Packages that don't change version for a long time, and don't get
recompiled with the latest compiler, etc etc and so on and so forth.

So what I want to do is give my computer a complete clean-out.  What I
really CAN'T be bothered doing is a complete format and re-install!

One idea I've had is to delete almost every entry in my 'world' file,
and then do an 'emerge depclean'.  That would be pretty cool, empty out
a huge amount of stuff, and then start re-installing at my leisure.

But what that *wouldn't* do is delete all the files in random places
that aren't owned by any particular package.  This would be a good thing
to do when spring cleaning, as it were.

Is there a tool that will allow me to find *all* files that aren't owned
by any package, so that I can then decide what to do with them?
Obviously skipping directories such as /home/.  Then I can delete
everything that doesn't look critical, hopefully without losing my stuff
in places like /boot or /etc either :-)

Then I think I would do an emerge -e system, and then start re-adding
applications I wanted.

What do you think?  Does anyone have any ideas about good ways of
'refreshing' my gentoo system?  All suggestions appreciated :-)

Thanks!

	Tom

-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list