Re: [gentoo-user] Removing excessive stuff from profile

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

On 13/07/2013 06:49, Andrew Lowe wrote:
> Hi all,
>     I have recently purchased a cubieboard:
> 
> http://cubieboard.org/
> 
> which is an ARM device with SATA. It is going to become a low power
> media server. I have followed the instructions on getting Gentoo onto it
> as outlined here:
> 
> pluto7777.blogspot.com.au   Monday March 18, 2013
> 
> I get a working system up and happening when I do the first boot. I then
> do the profile selection as listed but there are no server profiles, all
> basically desktop orientated. I chose 27 as suggested but when I do the
> 
> emerge --pretend -NuD world
> 
> I get an emerge that has over 250 items and includes things such as
> cups, libraries for image viewing etc etc, all stuff fine for a desktop
> but just additional stuff that my little server won't need.
> 
>     So my question is, what files do I have to fiddle to stop portage
> from wanting to install all of these additional files? I've looked in
> the world file and there is basically nothing there so I'm guessing it's
> in the profile somewhere - but just where?


At this point in the process, world is indeed empty or nearly empty,
nothing wrong with that.

profile definitions are in /var/portage/profiles, the one you are using
is the /etc/portage/make.conf symlink[1]

If you examine the files in those directories, you'll quickly see how
it's constructed - it's a tree structure, files have parents and have
entries to add and remove things. If you *really* want to, you can
define new profiles for yourself and store them anywhere convenient, as
a profile is really just some date files and pointers to other data
files. man 5 portage gives further details on what can be in each type
of file (type is indicated by name).

There are no more "server" profiles as such, that idea is deprecated.
Nowadays we have base profiles instead, like
default/linux/amd64/13.0
and desktop variants like
default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop


It's most likely you have most desktop features enabled. Two approaches:

- Post the output of "eselect profile list" run as root
- Post the output of "emerge --info" | grep USE




[1] On your system the profiles might be in /usr/portage/profiles and
the symlink might be /etc/make.profile.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com