I am trying to remove unneeded packages from kde such as kdetoys, kdeedu and kdegames. However, whenever I emerge -uvaD world, it keeps trying to emerge them again. I then tried to add them to package.maask but that failed with a message that they are dependencies for kdebase (3.3.2). Is there a reason for them being dependencies and if not can they be removed from the dependency list. Maybe there should be a place in USE files to add in unnecessary kde and gnome packages. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Those packages are in no way dependencies of kde-base/kdebase. They are dependencies of kde-base/kde, which is a complete kde installation.
You are right, it is a dependency on kde not kdebase, nevertheless the request is the same. When installing a full kde distribution, it would be nice to be able to have control on the non-essential packages (without having to do everything manually and skip installing kde-base/kde). Such as mozilla has many options not to install mail, irc, etc... It would be nice to have USE flags for the major packages such as kde and gnome
Your request doesn't make any sense - there's like 12 kde packages, if you want a certain one, emerge it. If you want all of them, emerge "kde". I don't understand how this would benefit from use flags.
It is a convenience issue, there are lots of packages associated with the kde desktop, most are necessary. However, there are some packages that are not necessary such as the ones I mentioned above. Having USE flags that can be set just makes it so much easier than having to wade through all of the packages, especially when not as familiar. I guess another question would be, what happens if I unmerge kde-base/kde? Would this affect future upgrades as packages get divided, added or merged? Would it affect the current installation of kde? Would it still try to install kde-base/kde whenever I did a emerge -uvaD world?
This has been brought up many times before - a quick search of the forums will tell all about it. In short, yes you can unmerge kde-base/kde and have it stop complaining about missing dependencies.
Any package which depends on kde will depend only on kdelibs or kdebase, not the full installation. Any more of an installation you want beyond that has to be installed by hand, which you can do manually or use the "kde-base/kde" meta package to install ALL kde packages. I don't see how use flags will help in this situation.
