Re: [gentoo-user] portage wants to remove less and nano

["Albert W. Hopkins" <marduk@letterboxes.org>]

On Fri, 2011-10-07 at 13:30 +0200, Niccolò Belli wrote:
> Il 07/10/2011 13:25, Willie Wong ha scritto:
> > Most likely you've never set them.
> 
> Shouldn't it ship with a default setting? Anyway even after setting a 
> default, portage still wants to remove both less and nano. I had to put 
> them in the world set.

I'll chime in.  I know this has been discussed so many times... but it
seems the discussion recurs.

You *can* get away with not putting virtuals in your world file, even
with the new portage behavior.  The trick is to not have any other
package satisfy the virtual.  For example, I use most as my pager and
gvim as my editor.  I uninstalled nano because I can't stand it and
never use it.  I also uninstalled less because I use most.  My world
file has neither most nor gvim in it, but because nothing else satisfies
the dependencies for virtual/pager and virtual/editor then they don't
get depclean'ed.

Of course this won't work for everyone.  If you have to have 2 pagers
installed, for example. Where I think some people will come into a
problem is with sys-apps/util-linux[ncurses].  This satisfies the
virtual/pager dep so it may want to clean sys-apps/more.  I don't have
the "ncurses" flag set for util-linux, so I don't have that issue.

Anyway a lot of people don't like the "new" behavior (which isn't really
new anymore).  I can't say I'm enthused about the change, but if you
think about (for a while) it makes sense, and it's not like it's going
to kill you to put nano/more/whatever in your world file.

-a