Kent Fredric posted on Thu, 12 Oct 2017 05:20:24 +1300 as excerpted: > This is especially annoying as: > > 1. Its very easy to overlook one package in a 400 package depclean > notice.
Wow. How'd you ever get a backlog of 400 packages in your depclean list, including critical ones you know you want to keep? These days portage even strongly suggests running depclean after an --update @world, in part to avoid such huge and confusing backlogs when it is run. > Related: > > It would also be nice if pkg_pretend ( or something like it ) happened > *BEFORE* offering the [Y/N] prompt with `emerge -va `, not, as it > currently does, wait until after you press "y" to execute those checks. That has irritated me a few times as well, tho I know /why/ it works that way. As the name suggests, pkg_pretend is /supposed/ to be run at pretend time, thus before the --ask prompt, both as originally designed and as speced by PMS. The problem the portage implementors apparently ran into is that some of the pkg_pretend stuff ends up being a bit expensive to run just to get the initial listing, so the (controversial) decision was made to run it /after/ the go-ahead. If it's going to double the processing time just for a pretend... Which kind of defeats the purpose I think, but... Maybe what we need is a two-stage pretend/ask, a first stage that does the minimum dependency graphing, etc, and a second stage that does the pkg_pretend. Then an --expensive flag could be added to enhance --pretend and --ask, that would run the second stage too, before the prompt for --ask. Maybe --expensive could automatically double backtrack count as well, so people could run with a lower backtrack by default and choose whether to run --expensive or deal with it manually if the lower backtrack didn't propose a satisfactory solution. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
