On Sunday 29 October 2006 15:17, Hans de Hartog wrote: [SNIP] > > I guess you've learned by now that you should never run > > --depclean blindly. Always run it with --pretend first and ensure that it > > doesn't do something stupid. Unfortunately this is a little late for that > > though... :( > > At the time that emerge --depclean was unsafe I used to do: > > emerge --pretend --depclean | grep / > dc2 > remove the first line from dc2 > for p in `cat dc2` > do echo --------- $p ---------- > equery depends $p > done > dc3 > And I could see what realy could be unmerged. > Then I learned from this mailing list that dep -d > would take my USE flags into account so I did "dep -d". > It showed me the list of things it was going to unmerge > and I saw the gcc.3.4 but thought: well, I know I have > gcc.4.something and what's the use of having an old > C compiler hanging around? So I let it go.... :-( [SNIP]
Ugh..! You've got this completely wrong. As of >=portage-2.1.1 `emerge --depclean` is quite safe (yet you still need to use --ask or --pretend as with any other emerge operation!) and it has always taken the use flags into account. I've never said anything about the reliability of `dep -d` (as I've never tried it and don't plan to try it either) and I think your experience goes to show that it is far from as safe as `emerge --depclean`. I'm pretty sure that `emerge --depclean` would never remove gcc... `equery depends` is what I've said doesn't take your use flags into account (and it doesn't). This means that if `equery depends` says foo doesn't need bar then foo doesn't need bar. But if it says foo needs bar then there is the possibility that due to the state of some use flag foo doesn't need bar on your system... That is entirely unrelated to the reliability of `emerge --depclean`. This only relates to querying for reverse dependencies with equery. And for querying for reverse dependencies `dep -L` is quite reliable. As is pquery from pkgcore and adjutrix from paludis. That says nothing about the reliability of `dep -d`, `dep -w` or `dep -s` etc. I don't know if either of those other options for dep are reliable or not (and quite frankly I don't care as I don't need them). IMO `emerge --depclean` is doing and excellent job! -- Bo Andresen
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