Bug 318249

Summary:	option to remove entries from /var/lib/portage/world which are dependencies of others
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab>
Component:	Core	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Arne Babenhauserheide 2010-05-03 07:50:20 UTC

Since my /var/lib/portage/world tends to grow unecessary entries from time to time, I’d love to see an option to clean out all entries from the world file which are actually dependencies of other entries is there — keeping circular dependencies. 

I just hit that when I started to customize my GentooXO (Gentoo stage4 on OLPC → http://gentooxo.org) for my own needs (mainly stripping it down). I had a lot of x11-libs entries in my world file from debugging sessions (“OK, what exactly is missing to make is work?”) and I realized that just throwing out unneeded entries and then stripping down by --depclean would prove a lot harder than it would have be (if I had all knowledge of portage at hand). 

A simple --output-worldfile-without-dependencies or similar would be useful for that. It would make sure that removing an entry from the world file would remove the corresponding program. 

I know that often some entries in world need to be redundant (even though xorg is a dependency of kde, I still want to keep it when I remove KDE). That’s why the command shouldn’t change the worldfile inplace, but rather output a stripped down file. 

Best wishes, 
Arne

Reproducible: Always