Re: [gentoo-user] How to safely unmerge a package

[Catalin Grigoroscuta]

Paul Varner wrote: However, there are two problems with equery: 1. it disregards the use flags. equery depends <package> displays all packages that may depend on a package, not the ones that really do on my system. I remember seeing something in bugzilla about this issue, but is was marked as fixed, but I could not figure out in which version (I have the latest gentoolkit). Can you give me an example? I'm not sure that I understand the issue. Let's take the package gnome-extra/evolution-data-server-1.2.3. It depends on mozilla package only if the mozilla use flag is set (and ssl) - thus, you can see "ssl? ( mozilla? ( www-client/mozilla )" in the ebuild. I do not have "mozilla" use flag set, and evolution-data-server-1.2.3 is also compiled without this flag. However, when I run "equery depends mozilla", I get "gnome-extra/evolution-data-server-1.2.3". Note that "equery depgraph evolution-data-server" does not show mozilla, so this works correctly. 2. it disregards the virtual packages. According to equery, I cas safely remove xorg-x11 (!), because no one depends on it! But if I do so, all packages depending on the virtual x11 package would be broken. So, considering this, can someone point out how can I safely remove a package? That is because the packages don't depend on xorg-x11, they depend on anything the provides the functionality of X. An equery depends virtual/x11 will show all of the packages that are dependent upon X. I have noted this as a potential enhancement to have equery look at the provides information and display the dependencies of the provided virtual. I do understand that they don't depend on xorg-x11, but on the xirtual package. However, since "equery depends xorg-x11" shows nothing, I might think that it's safe to remove it - I have no way of knowing that this will break all packages that depend on x11. So, what is a potential enhancement from your point of view is really a bug from mine - it's useless to know the direct dependencies on a package if I do not know the "hidden"dependencies through virtual packages. Note that qpkg worked correctly, showing dependencies on virtual packages as well. Regards, Paul Regards, Catalin