ClaytonL said:
Alright I'm pretty sure theres no such thing. In Gentoo there is a file /var/lib/portage/world that only displays explicitly installed packages. So if I tell emerge to install package A, but it has to install packages B and C first, it will only show me package A in my world file. I'm trying to find it to make package maintainence easier. In Gentoo I can remove a package than use emerge to remove all of the now orphaned dependencies (if there is any). There isn't an equivelent in FreeBSD so I was thinking I could just look at what I've explicitly installed and use pkg_cutleaves to remove the main package and any orphaned dependencies. Why isn't there such features in FreeBSD? I've been trying to get into FreeBSD for a while because I'm anti GPL and it has a lot of hype behind it, but I find it lacks a lot of features. I'm assuming for some reason. Thanks for your thoughts.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you, but you're looking for something like
emerge -C <package>
.
? There are multiple means to do this ...
portmaster (third party tool) features this functionality, as does
portinstall/
portupgrade/etc (third party tool) IIRC. There are most likely other tools that help you prune unnecessary packages, but I'm not sure what they are right offhand.
Honestly, the world file was never really (IMO) meant to be a means of controlling what to have installed when doing a clean, but I suppose it could be used when doing an install from scratch on a system. Seems like an inefficient way though, because you'd basically have to do emerge -e world in order to do that, unless you iterated through just the contents.
If you're looking for a means of recording what you installed last for packages, it's a bit trickier because there are actually two facilities for installing what I term as leaf-packages (it's what other folks might call top-level dependent packages, or REQUIRED-BY packages). Either way, there are methods for determining what lives at the top and what can be pruned, but it hasn't been developed yet, outside of
pkg_cutleaves -- which is a fantastic tool... don't get me wrong.. but it's easy to make mistakes when you're in a hurry diving through prompts.