On 26/02/2022 22:14, Ramces Tampo-og Red wrote:
I see. I will be wary of my world file from now on. I'm glad that you mentioned this now since I don't have that much packages installed yet and I haven't played around with the system enough that there's a chance that it might break. Knowing this is really handy since it might not be apparent when things that shouldn't be added in the world file are being added to the world file.
If you think you might have been guilty of this, just edit your world file with vim or whatever, delete everything you don't recognise or you recognise as having been done for troubleshooting, and save it. It won't make any difference to your running system. Just be careful not to delete by accident stuff you really did want (although you could always re-emerge it).
Then try an "emerge --depclean --pretend" and see what would be removed. Last time I did that, I then manually -C'd each package in turn - not least because I need to update my kernel an d depclean buggers that up if you're not careful ... always do an emerge, build new kernel, depclean quickly, in that order, with no sync in the middle! Otherwise you might end up cursing ...
The other thing is, (and it's probably already been mentioned,) is make sure you know how to use package.use and package.accept. Don't add things like ~amd to our global settings, just add them freely for VERSIONED stuff in those directories. Then as updates come along, all your changes get left behind as "no longer necessary".
I learnt this the hard way, I enabled ~amd for a package that had no stable versions, that required a new ~amd version of glibc, that then blocked any attempt to update my system! So there was a trail of messages on this list as I worked out how to fix the mess :-)
By putting all this stuff in package.accept and package.use, I can keep track, and if the file is old it's probably out of date and ripe for deletion. I can just move it out the way, try an update, and if it blows up look what's in the file I've moved to see what I need to keep and what cruft can be deleted.
Cheers, Wol
