Re: [gentoo-server] prioritising security updates

[Ben Munat <bent@munat.com>]

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 September 2005 04:04, Ben Munat wrote:
> 
>>So, how do I wind up with 17 packages that need to be updated? Hmm, perhaps
>>these are all packages on my system that are neither in my world file nor
>>depdencies of stuff in my world file? Would that then make them orphaned?
>>And theoretically safe to delete? How does one find out if a specific
>>package is required by any other packages again?
> 
> Only packages you explicitly emerge are recorded in the world profile 
> (/var/lib/portage/world) dependencies are not. See the man pages for portage 
> and emerge for more details.
> 
> HTH
> 

Thanks... however, I knew this much -- found that I have to be careful with this when 
getting going on a new gentoo system. It's handy to say "emerge somephpapp" and get php 
and mysql in the process... except then they're not in my world file.... though I suppose 
I can always just add them by hand.

But doing an "emerge -D world" should find any dependencies of anything in the world file 
that need updating, right? So, my questions still stand: are these packages that 
glsa-check is finding stuff that other packages depended on at one point -- so they got 
pulled in -- but are now no longer needed? And what tool can I use to ascertain this? 
"emerge --depclean" is basically useless... it always wants to uninstall things that I'm 
fairly sure are needed. "etcat" doesn't seem to have anything for finding dependecies. And 
"equery depends" is still "unimplemented"... (though I thought I'd used that at one point 
but it seems to find no results for everything I try).

Ideas anyone? What do you use to keep orphaned packages off your system?

b
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