2008/9/25 James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com>:

> Do you have any further advice, more detail or some more formalized methodology
> to 'clean' the world file, in addition to what you have stated above?
>

Every entry in the world file that has a reverse dependency could be
removed. Unfortunately there is no tool I know which can calculate
reverse dependencies correctly. Maybe there is some functionality in
pkgcore or paludis which I am not aware of. So others need to inform
us about this.

However, this question has already been raised and Alber Hopkins
attached a python script in an earlier thread which should show
unneeded entries in the world file. It did not work for me but I have
attached it, maybe you have more luck than I.

The solution I use is app-portage/udept. It is not maintained anymore
so I recommend to use the ebuild from this bug [1] which at least has
a few advantages over the ebuild in the tree. Udept used to be a
powerful script but a few functions do not work properly anymore. The
option for cleaning the world file works reliable though. Just invoke
it with "dep -w"

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172611

Regards,

Daniel