by on December 20, 2007
From time to time it can be very useful to check all of the installed packages on the system. Often emerged packages pull a whole bunch of dependencies on the system. The problem is that these dependencies are not removed when the package that pulled in the other packages is unmerged.
Officially there is a portage tool named depclean (emerge -–depclean) that searches for unused packages that are not necessary for other packages. But everyone who once tried this tool can say that it’s not working that great. Often really important packages are found to be unmerged and would badly damage the system.
A useful alternative for this problem is a tool named udept (which can be found in the portage tree in app-portage/udept) in my experience it’s working nearly failure-free and relatively fast on the top. So just give it a try – it’s worth testing
dep -dp (depclean-mode with pretend-flag)
dep -L <package-name> (reverse dependencies from <package-name>)
dep -l <package-name> (dependencies from <package-name>)
dep -Ln <package-name> (reverse dependencies (+uninstalled) from <package-name>)