On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael P. Soulier <msoulier@digitaltorque.ca> wrote:
I'm new to gentoo, and I recently changed my USE flags, so I ran

emerge -p --depclean

to see what it suggests removing.

Along with many others, I see

 dev-lang/python
   selected: 2.4.4-r13
  protected: none
    omitted: 2.5.2-r7

msoulier@anton:~$ equery list | grep dev-lang/python
dev-lang/python-2.4.4-r13
dev-lang/python-2.5.2-r7

So it's going to remove the redundant python version, is that right? Any
chance of shared files being removed?

There are chances that it will remove some shared files.
To avoid this use revdep-rebuild after emerge --depclean. revdep-rebuild would rebuild all packages with broken libraries/binaries.

Python is a bit special: you should use python-updater before unmerging older python. python-updated would reinstall all python modules for newer python.

--
Vladimir Rusinov
http://greenmice.info/