Re: [gentoo-user] removing kde4(sets)

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

On Thursday 29 October 2009 21:17:23 Paul Hartman wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> > On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:45:54 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote:
> >> >> Are there any tricks to remove all of kde4, or do
> >> >> I have to do it manually?
> >> >
> >> > The set and the meta-package pull in basically the same packages.
> >> > Unmerge the set, emerge kde-meta then do a depclean to catch any
> >> > stragglers.
> >>
> >> I would just delete the set from the world_sets file, then emerge
> >> kde-meta, then depclean... much easier than unmerging everything and
> >> recompiling it.
> >
> > Sorry, that's what I meant. I was thinking that unmerging a set was like
> > unmerging a meta-package, that only the set itself would go.
> 
> Ah, okay, we meant the same thing then. :) AFAK emerge -C @set will
> remove everything in @set but there's no portage command to remove the
> set definition without unmerging what's in it.  I could be wrong on
> that, though.

You could be wrong, but you are not :-)

Your understanding of emerge -C @<set> is correct.

Portage treats the contents of a set as strictly depending on the set itself. 
So there is no way to remove a set definition and leave it's child packages 
intact - they would then be orphans.

Unless of course the child packages are themselves in world or depend on 
something in world. But that's a side-effect of something else altogether and 
not relevant to set behaviour. 

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com