Re: [gentoo-user] Re: emerge @system

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 4:12 PM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@×××××××.net> wrote:
> On 2016-08-29 20:08, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>
>> Surely the addition of X, and maybe kde or gnome, to your USE flags is
>> what is causing so many packages to be pulled in by @system.
>>
>> I found something similar when building a new system recently, @system
>> pulled in X and a shedload of dependencies. Switching to a non-desktop
>> profile meant far fewer packages were needed to get a basic system.
>
> Can you safely do this (change profile) on an existing system, and how?
> Will it affect @world, and more generally, will it cause the next update
> do work that would otherwise not be done?
>

Switching profile isn't a big deal as long as you don't mess with the
toolchain.  You can't just go between multilib and non-multilib, for
example.  However going from desktop to base is trivial.

Now, if you switch from desktop to base, rebuild half your system,
then switch back to desktop, then of course emerge will want to
rebuild half your system again.  Or if you go from systemd to
non-systemd and have systemd as your init, then obviously you'll get a
surprise on reboot if you don't change your kernel command line.

Changing profiles is no different from changing a whole bunch of USE
flags for the most part.

In general you should set your profile/flags to whatever you want them
at and leave it there, unless you're trying to fix some kind of
circular dependency issue.  You're not going to save any time by
dropping flags and then re-enabling them.

-- 
Rich