Re: [gentoo-dev] Of death and prerm

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 08/30/2017 10:24 AM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 08/30/2017 10:10 AM, Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
>>
>> I wonder though, per the original idea, wouldn't it make more sense to
>> allow uninstallation to continue and just very verbosely
>> warn/log/document what the package removal didn't do, so that it can
>> be done later by hand as needed?
>>
> 
> My gut feeling is "no," but who knows. Would you want --depclean to
> delete a user who owns files on your system without some prompt?

Ugh, nevermind -- my response is nonsense now that I re-read what you
asked. I think I've been waking up too early.

The downside to removing the package but not actually removing the user
is that you no longer have an accurate record of which users portage
installed for you. That list of no-longer-necessary-but-still-present
users is like a TODO list for people to keep their systems clean.
Keeping a bunch of unused system accounts -- some with shell access --
is its own risk.

Right now my /etc/passwd contains 29 lines, and I don't know which ones
I can delete. I think it's a nice feature if we can remedy that; running
--depclean would tell me which users are no longer needed, and after
I've cleaned up their files, I could userdel them and force portage to
uninstall the associated packages.