In server enviroment, usually are hosted many apllications. For many of them we have to install packages, which are neededonly for one app, onle for ine customer. After some time, customer goes away, and we want to purge server from his application, this step is easy. Problem appears when we want to remove unneeded packages from gentoo. "Hmm, is dev-python/py-xmlrpc needed or no? maybe someone do 'emerge dev-python/py-xmlrpc' instead 'emerge -1 dev-python/py-xmlrpc'? Which application need it? I don't know, i'll py-xmlrpc in system, it's safer option" And in this way number of packages installed on server grows and grows. I imagine something like this: # emerge --comment "this package is neede by XYZ company, application fizz-bizz needs it" foo/bar And when hit: # emerge --info foo/bar (or emerge --info ---comment foo/bar) i would get my (or added by other contributor) explanation, what for i've installed this package in server. Reproducible: Always
The other way around is to track down packages installed by user (and not pulled in as dependencies, for eg.), like entropy and apt do (as well as many others). This is called "install source", where source stands for: user (human being), package (...), etc.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 332049 ***
