On Thursday 20 May 2010 10:05:57 Willie Wong wrote: > On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 07:38:43AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > On Thursday 20 May 2010 06:34:37 Willie Wong wrote: > > > Hi list, > > > > > > I ran 'eclean-dist' last night (with no additional arguments) to clean > > > out /usr/portage/distfiles. And it generated a bit of interesting > > > > > > output that I haven't seen before: > > > The folowing Deprecated installed packages were found > > > > > > media-libs/libpng-1.2.43-r1 > > > dev-python/reportlab-2.3-r1 > > > app-i18n/gcin-1.4.7_pre17 > > > sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.31-r9 > > > dev-perl/URI-1.53 > > > dev-java/sun-jdk-1.5.0.22 > > > > > > I don't see anything about this feature in 'man eclean'; does anyone > > > know what this is all about? > > > > It means those package version are deprecated and you are encouraged to > > upgrade them. > > Ah... I see, I was trying to figure out what they meant by deprecated > and how they determined it. It seems that the only thing common to > those packages is that their ebuilds are no-longer in the tree. > > So I guess I'm not going to worry too much about it: if they haven't > gotten updated regularly that probably means they are either bdeps or > that they will be depcleaned the next time I do it.
This word "deprecated" confuses tons of people. I don't know if it does that to you or not, but lots of other people read this list, so for their benefit here goes. "deprecated" means "this package has been superceded by something else and although it is still available and works, you are encouraged to stop using it and upgrade". The intent is that eventually a deprecated package will go away. The root word it derives from basically means "to make smaller or less important". It's not the same thing as "depreciate" or "removed" or "obsolete" or "disappeared". Each one of those packages you list has more up to date versions available in the tree. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
