Re: [gentoo-user] Cleaning up world

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 19 May 2009 19:32:01 felix@crowfix.com wrote:
> In a previous thread, I learned about keeping world simple with
> --oneshot.  I realized how mine had gotten so bloated -- when I
> update, I edit the --pretend output and feed that directly into
> emerge without the benefit of --oneshot.
>
> So today I started a cleanup project.  I began by moving world to
> world-bloated and running emerge --depclean -p just to see what would
> happen.  The answer is ... a loop!
>
> There were a couple of missing or out of date packages and I emerged
> them.  But libusb has to be 10.6 to make some packages happy and 10.7
> to satisfy others.
>
> I have been down this route before.  I don't feel like unmerging
> either side of the mess, and even if I didn't want the packages, it is
> way too much hassle to unmerge them one by one as the list of unhappy
> packages grows.
>
> So, what is the proper way to recreate a proper world file?  If
> depclean can finally run one of these days when gentoo gets back in
> sync, is staring with an empty world file as good as anything else?
> The idea of trying to make intelligent guesses about which packages
> are truly top level, out of 3000+ packages, is not enticing.

Step 1 is to make sure the machine is up to date - emerge -avuND world
Otherwise you are trying to take things out and portage is trying to put 
things in - confusing. Then satisfy the blockers like that issue with libusb, 
but chances are emerge world fixed that already.

Edit the world file and remove every version number in that file if present. 
You don;t need it and portage is infinitely better at tracking it than you 
are. Then remove everything with a category ending in "lib", these rarely need 
to be in world.

Periodically run emerge -av --depclean adding things back to world that you do 
want - it's a rinse and repeat process.

If you use kde and gnome, I'll bet you have every package listed. Remove them 
all and add kde-meta or gnome back in (or maybe the @kde set if you use that). 
Let portage worry about dependencies.

By now you should be getting the idea that there's no easy way to recreate a 
minimum world file from an existing system. eix-test-obsolete looks like it 
ought to do this, but unfortunately doesn't.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com