Posted: Fri May 24, 2002 8:36 pm Post subject: A way to unmerge old packages the easy way

I've posted a script in Tips'n'Tricks which unmerges old builds where you forgot to do so yourself (usually because of somewhat overzealous use of the emerge --update command) . I would very much appreciate some feedback on it ... thanks!

It should but ... on my box I have been running it on a regular basis. However, when I was browsing my list of builds using both emerge -s and qpkg -I, I noticed that some were showing up to have as many as three previous revisions installed . Clearly, the combination of running emerge --update and emerge clean hadn't been doing the job for me fully. It's possible, perhaps, that this could be associated with (a) limitations of the earlier versions of portage (b) my earlier of performing --update very frequently. Perhaps this has not been a problem for recent installers of Gentoo, nevertheless these have been my observations. Apart from that, all of my Gentoo-related problems have been minor.

The Portage User Guide still states under "3. Upgrading Packages" that the way to upgrade a package is to emerge it, then to explicity unmerge an older build (i.e. by build name, with version number). This further implies that to 100% cleanly unlink older files, you need to unmerge each older build in turn. No implication is made that the --update command has quite the same effect, and it hasn't in my case. I noticed this very recently, and knocked up my effort pretty quickly because I wanted a cleaner base on which to recompile some new builds with different optimisations and it would have been tedious to peform these steps manually