On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 10:49 -0700, Michael Higgins wrote: > I attempted to emerge 'twinkle', a soft phone, but whoever made the ebuild > neglected to include a dependency on KDE libraries. > > Of course, since I don't have KDE libs, emerge failed. But before failing, > the ebuild had pulled in, built, and installed two *new* packages. > > As these packages were new dependencies only needed by 'twinkle' (which > failed to install), I'd expect running emerge --prune immediately afterward > to remove these unnecessary packages. > > But it didn't. Something should, however. > > Rather than my asserting that --prune is broken, since it apparently does > *something* (just not what I'd expect), can someone give me a helpful clue as > to what WILL remove these unneeded libraries? '-) > > Cheers, > You should *never* use --prune. It's only there for people looking for interesting ways to break their systems. The fact that it didn't remove anything indicates that maybe you don't have multiple slots of a package installed and you just got "lucky".
Either manually remove the packages using --unmerge or use --depclean