emerge depclean listed linc as a library that may be unmerged. Actually running the depclean caused gdm to fail due to linc missing. Attempting to recompile failed because it could not find linc, but portage was unaware that it needed to emerge linc first. Easy workaround is, of course, to have linc already installed or emerge it first, but it would be nice to have this handled automatically. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
What version of gdm are you using? Since Gnome 2.4 linc is no longer needed since ORBit2 (>= 2.8.0) took over its functionality. linc was a dependency of ORBit2-2.6.x it might be that some library is still linked against linc (because of its age) so you might have to recompile some stuff. Try "revdep-rebuild -p --soname liblinc.so" it should show you the packages requiring recompilation.
Felix in #2 is right, it might be referenced to by older libs still on your system. revdep should fix that. 'emerge depclean' i consider an advanced function not meant for daily use, aka it's not safe to use. Problems that arise from it you should be able to fix yourself. But i think depclean has enough bright red letters to indicate that itsself.
The link to linc is, indeed, through ORBit; most of the GNOME base needed recompiling to actually break the links gdm was depending on.
*** Bug 36963 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Hmm, I believe I should continue bug 36963 here. I'm most sorry for not finding this bug. I thought I had done my due dilligence, but hmm.. ok. I'm fully to blaim for ignoring the warnings about depclean. But this doesn't change the fact that when depclean removes something that shouldn't be removed (assuming that it does it's dependency calculations right). Then there exist some kind of runtime dependency that hasn't been recorded. The very way depclean works is suited to uncover subtle bugs in the dependencies of an ebuild. The fact that depclean doesn't work combined with the strong warnings underlines that you run it on your own peril. But remedies should be taken to try to fix this, due to the above mentioned reasons. To state my opinion very clear: DEPCLEAN SHOULD WORK!
*** Bug 37020 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
