From time to time I decide to seriously clean up my system – and today was one of those days.
What started as a simple config-decruft session to clean up the clutter in my /etc/paludis/* Paludis config files, evolved into an epic battle with the system.
I blame this mostly on myself, as it seems that what turned my world file into garbage was my own doing – I was pretty careless about normally emerging packages that shouldn't be a part of the world file in the first year – and I think my (ab)use of Kuroo didn't help either.
Well, long story short: after I cleaned up my Paludis configuration files, and ran paludis --uninstall-unused -p to see which obsolete packages I have on my system and should be removed, I got a 410 packages that Paludis claimed they were unneeded, because they were neither in world nor depended on a package that was. Amongst them was also most of KDE and a lot of other important packages! "Bloody hell!!", I though to myself and already started to calculate in my head how many days will it take to remerge all these packages to get them back into world.
But then I thought better of it and asked for help on #paludis and sure enough people suggested to insert the needed packages from paludis --uninstall-unused -p (or better yet: paludis --report because it says what's wrong) back into the world file.
Yes, this is exactly what all HOWTOs and manuals strongly advise you not to do!
But when you've got a seriously foo world, you just have to do it!
So, when I collected all the troublesome packages from paludis --report – which took quite a while, because I suck at sed and regexp, so I had to do most of it by hand – I appended it to /var/lib/portage/world.
Now, this could have been enough for an ugly workaround, but I've been cleaning my system, so I decided to clean up the world as well.
This meant that I had to remove all entries from /var/lib/portage/world that shouldn't be there (i.e. are dependencies or part of system), unless I explicitly want them as a part of the world. For those packages that I wasn't 100% sure, I checked with paludis --uninstall --pretend
I'll just say, I'm very glad that Kate has an integrated KonsolePart.
Well, when I cleaned up my world and ran paludis -s; paludis -i world; paludis --uninstall-unused; reconcilio to clean up the system, I got more then 40 packages that really were obsolete and now my system is finally clean and with a world that looks as it should!
…I'm sure glad, that's over with!
hook out → after a Sacher cake with Sacher tea to complement it while hacking, drinking green jasmine tea and starting to study late