Due to my aformentioned space limitation, I have sought to understand the "emerge" package management tool to see how it might help me overcome my plight. What started as a simple strategy, uninstall almost everything, install X, and try again, has turned out to be far more complicated.
Emerge has the post powerful dependancy resolution engines of any Linux package manager I'm aware of. I'm really quite impressed with the "slotting" feature that allows different versions of the same package to be installed at once. I enjoy being able to do an "emerge -p somepackage" and see all the packages that will be built. Cool stuff.
What I found out about emerge surprised me. Emerge will not let you use it's wonderful dependancy engine for uninstalling things. So, suppose I want to uninstall "gnome", which has a bunch of dependancies, I would type "emerge unmerge gnome". Only one problem, it will uninstall gnome without uninstalling anything that depends on "gnome".
Now, I'm all for flexability. If I want to break dependancies, my package manager should let me, but emerge doesn't even give me a choice. I was reduced to using "qpkg -I -q gnome" to find all the dependancies by hand. (Note, "qpkg" is not installed by default, it's part of "gentoolkit".) I was shocked to find out I have no automated way of doing this! In this respect "apt" wins. I can install things with dependancies and *uninstall* them with dependancies.
Posted by enigma at March 3, 2004 09:56 PMInteresting. Did you find anything in the gentoo forums on this? Because I thought the clean option would remove any libraries and packages that are no longer needed.
Posted by: hystrix at March 5, 2004 08:15 AMSee the manpage for emerge under depclean.
Posted by: bfn at March 5, 2004 09:11 PMI really surprised when discover the same thing that you did... I was reading about paludis (http://paludis.pioto.org/) as an alternative.
I'm eeally dissapointed with portage =S ... But i continuing using it (i supose).
Thanks for your article