On Thursday 03 November 2005 01:52, Sebastian Redl wrote: > Duncan wrote: > >What depclean does is starting from your world file (and including stuff > >in your system profile that's not specifically listed in the world file), > >figure out what each package listed there needs to RUN (run-time > >dependencies, as opposed to compile-time dependencies), BASED ON CURRENT > >USE FLAGS, then unmerge other packages as unnecessary. > > Actually, that's not 100% correct. If that was so, depclean would never > remove system packages. > But it does. On my setup, which is purely udev, depclean wants to > remove devfsd. It warns me that it wants to remove the system package, > but it would do it anyway.
devfsd and udev are responsible for managing the /dev filesystem so the system profile needs a package that fills this requirement. # grep dev-manager /usr/portage/profiles/base/packages virtual/dev-manager The gentoo developers decided to make this system requirement depend on a virtual so the profile becomes more flexible. # grep dev-manager /usr/portage/profiles/base/virtuals virtual/dev-manager sys-fs/udev And there we have it, the Gentoo developers have decided they want udev to be responsible for managing the /dev filesystem. So we can conclude: 1. devfsd is obsolete and replaced by udev 2. if udev is installed (which it should) then the system profiles requirement for a dev-manager has been filled 3. devfsd is no longer required for the system profile and can be removed Why do I get the warning about unmerging a system package? Because devfsd still provides virtual/dev-manager, virtual/dev-manager is still part of the system profile. So even though Gentoo favors udev over devfsd, devfsd still provides functionality that the system profile requires. And that's why you get that message. Note: You can safely unmerge devfsd as long as you've got RC_DEVICES set to "auto" or "udev" in /etc/conf.d/rc -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list