On 12/07/17 15:36, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 15:19:32 +1000
> "Sam Jorna (wraeth)" <wraeth@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 12/07/17 15:14, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
>>> Is it in system?
>>> Is it in a set?
>>> Is it in world?
>>> If no to all, its a dep, warn!  
>>
>> All this says is whether the package was explicitly installed and
>> recorded in world, or is a member of @system. The target package may
>> or may not be a dependency, may or may not have been --oneshot'd.
> 
> Then when the user sees the warning they can discard knowing they
> merged the package with --oneshot.

I have trouble remembering what I ate for dinner last night, let alone
what I may or may not have merged a week, month or year ago, or what
options I used when merging it.

> What harm does a warning do?

Depends on the user, which can't really be avoided, but means that
warnings should be clear and meaningful, otherwise they become
background noise.

>> It may have been installed as a dependency but the requiring package
>> was removed,
> 
> Then the person failed to run --depclean and maintain their system.
> Either way, did the person install the package directly?
> 
> If the package was not installed by the user. Should they not be warned
> about removing something they did not install?

Such as:

emerge --unmerge dev-python/keyring
 * This action can remove important packages! In order to be safer, use
 * `emerge -pv --depclean <atom>` to check for reverse dependencies before
 * removing packages.

>> or may have been installed as an orphan but is now a
>> dependency. 
> 
> Now being a dependency the warning would be valid.

"Sometimes being accurate" is not the most noble of goals.

>> Assuming that if it's not in a set it must be a dependency  is
>> incorrect and misleading.
> 
> Again there are various ways. There cannot be that much overhead to
> check if a single package depends on one being removed. If you cannot
> use simpler methods as mentioned.
> 
> Clearly people have objections to warnings about packages users did not
> install themselves....
> 

So the idea is to duplicate the functionality of '--depclean <package>'
without actually checking to see if the package is a dependency, only
whether it is listed in a set; or to check if it's a dependency of
/something/ and, if so, redirect the user to the command they should be
using anyway?

-- 
Sam Jorna (wraeth)
GnuPG ID: D6180C26