How to properly get rid of packages???

[southpaw]

In other words, for instance, if I want to get rid of gnome and all the packages that came with it how do I go about doing this? I already tried this:

# emerge --unmerge gnome

But it still doesn't get rid of the 100+ Mb of extra crap that I don't need, so does anybody know the right way to do this???

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

maybe

emerge --clean

or

emerge --depclean

i've not had access to my computer for a while but i think one of those should work. also:

emerge --help

should give more details about the options.[/code]

[Cabhan]

The "gnome" package doesn't actually install anything, but rather has as its dependencies all the actual gnome packages.

So what happens is that "gnome" is added to the world file, and the other packages are just installed.

"emerge depclean" looks at every package not in the world file and sees if anything still requires it. If not, it will remove that package.

So to get rid of gnome, you should do:

emerge --unmerge gnome
emerge depclean -p  <-- Check what you're removing
emerge depclean

After doing an 'emerge depclean', you should always run "revdep-rebuild", which will reinstall any libraries that are needed but were accidentally removed (due to odd dependency stuff).

[southpaw]

Works like a charm, thanx .

[Zero-0-Effect]

Alternatively to just remove gnome, and not remove its dependencies, you could just do this:

equery list *gnome | grep gnome | xargs emerge --unmerge --pretend (remove pretend after verifying whats being removed)

You could then delete the gnome directorys if you wanted as there not needed, all they hold is configuration settings which emerge doesnt touch.
This is useful when upgrading or planning on reinstalling gnome at a later time.

emerge depclean removes alot of dependencies that will have to be just reinstalled to satisfy other packages.