At Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:22:56 -0800,
Hello,
Jason Evans wrote:
> This seems like a critical limitation to me. It means that unless I have a
> deep understanding of the dependencies among packages, the number of
> packages on my system can only grow.
Truly.
According to my short experience of gentoo (1.4rc4), though, i think you'll
find out that your box keeps growing only during the first month or so.
Indeed, after having reached its "maturity", your box should not be growing
that much.
Imho, i think i can be explained by the fact that though we have a huge
diversity of applications and libs at our disposal, we all actually use more
or less the same subset.
In my case, i rarely install a new app anymore. And when i feel i have to do so,
most of the libs it needs are already merged.
As for your impression of your box getting cluttered by many unused packages as
the time goes on, i think it's up to you not to blindly emerge a package along
with all its dependancies.
I don't know if it's part of some official design, but i feel that gentoo
encourages its users to think before doing anything.
If you're as "minimalistic" as i am, you'll find out that gentoo really helps it
that field.
The well-known (well, i *think* it's well known) cycle :
emerge -vp ...
USE="..." emerge -vp ...
USE="..." emerge -v ...
is an efficient way of keeping your box clean.
In short, make use of USE *before*, instead of cleaning *after* ;-)
Note: These are only my own feelings and my way of using gentoo.
I hope it will be of any help to you.
Regards,
--
Pierre-François
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