On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 6:07 PM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Paul Hartman > <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Thanks guys. I understand how portage works and what to do to clean >>> things up. That part isn't an issue this time around. >>> >>> I'm more trying to understand whether this is just left over from old >>> installs and hasn't gotten cleaned up along the way. I had about 6 >>> emul-linux packages. The all were dependencies of the two that are >>> left so I simply removed them from the world file knowing they'd stay >>> in and didn't need to be listed. Clearly I can remove these last two >>> from world and they'll all go away but before I did that I just wanted >>> to make sure there wasn't anything magic about them. For instance, >>> maybe the emul-java file is some subset of running java in >>> firefox-bin? If it was would it show up as a dependency? I don't know. >>> >>> None of this is a big deal. I was just poking around and decided to do >>> an early spring cleaning. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Mark >> >> My understanding is that nothing goes into world unless you explicitly >> put it there (either by directly editing the file or by emerging that >> package directly). So you shouldn't need to worry about dependencies >> or anything. If that package is needed by something else you've got >> installed, it'll stay regardless of whether it is in world or not. >> >> Paul > > Right, absolutely right. But one weakness in this regard would be with > revdep-rebuild. Maybe it finds a bunch of things that got broken and > gives you a list you can run to clean things up. If for some reason > they are not run --one-shot (like maybe I make a mistake, copy a few > but not all of the list and forget the -1 that it puts in) then I end > up with something in my world file that didn't fundamentally need to > be there. > > It's not that the tools are wrong. They are probably fine. But after a > few years of updating packages stuff gets overlooked or gets in when > you aren't wide awake... > > I feel like in the old days we had to have some emul-linux packages in > so as to get win32codecs and the like to work. Is that not still true? > I'll go read whatever the current install docs suggest and see what I > might learn. I built this machine 4-5 years ago so it's been awhile. > > Cheers, > Mark > > - Mark
Well, I think it sounds like you and I have probably done the same things (emerging some random libs and packages without oneshot). I had about 3 years of uncleaned world before the first time I did it and there was an awful lot of unnecessary junk in there. If you run into any packages that require you to manually emerge something else like that you should report it as a bug. If it has a dependency that isn't worked out automatically by portage it is broken (in my opinion). There are certainly programs that are optional dependencies that portage doesn't take care of, like various helper programs for k3b (and kde4 in general). Not needed to build but if available at run time they provide additional functionality. Those are the kinds of things that I can never remember why it's in my world file and it may not be immediately obvious that something is missing if I unmerge them. Generally the rule I use for my own world file is "Is this a program I actually use?" and if not, cut it out and see what happens. :) I got rid of win32codecs after mplayer-bin got nuked out of portage. The 64-bit mplayer seems to handle almost everything with the exception of iv50 codec... i'm not aware of any 64-bit way to play those. I think the amd64codecs package only has realplayer-related codecs. Luckily iv50 videos are increasingly rare these days, so it's really not much of a problem. Good luck! :) Paul
