Solved pkg clutter and autoremove

[mwgary]

Hi

I'm currently running on FreeBSD 14.1, recently upgraded from 13.2. Over the course of time I've managed to accumulate quite a lot of clutter from package dependencies, from packages I removed, and need to eliminate them. However when I try the issue pkg autoremove, the system has flagged pretty much the whole of my kde5-plasma and the Qt support libraries for removal. So not wanting to fsck my computer, I backed out of it.

Is there a way of fixing this issue, or am I stuck with it?

suggestions appreciated

Thanks
Mark G.

 

[SirDice]

Maybe you installed x11/kde5 initially, then removed parts of it? That would have marked x11/plasma5-plasma as an 'automatic' installed dependency. Because there's nothing depending on it any more (kde5 itself has since been removed) pkg-autoremove(8) will try to remove it.

You can mark packages as non-automatic using pkg-set(8); pkg set -A0 plasma5-plasma for example. Then check pkg-autoremove(8) again. Set packages you definitely want to keep to 'non-automatic' so an autoremove won't try to remove them.

 

[mwgary]

Maybe you installed x11/kde5 initially, then removed parts of it? That would have marked x11/plasma5-plasma as an 'automatic' installed dependency. Because there's nothing depending on it any more (kde5 itself has since been removed) pkg-autoremove(8) will try to remove it.

You can mark packages as non-automatic using pkg-set(8); pkg set -A0 plasma5-plasma for example. Then check pkg-autoremove(8) again. Set packages you definitely want to keep to 'non-automatic' so an autoremove won't try to remove them.

Thanks for the reply. It did point me in the right direction, as I may have removed parts of it, inadvertently, as it looks like for some reason the kde5 meta package was missing, despite my kde5 desktop working perfectly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

So is did a "pkg install kde5", the package plus some other bits got installed, and redone the pkg autoremove, and voila! worked fine this time.

Many thanks.
Mark G.

 

[SirDice]

Right, both x11/plasma5-plasma (a "barebones" KDE desktop) and x11/kde5 (full KDE desktop plus a bunch of bells and whistles) are so-called "meta-ports". They don't contain anything of themselves, they only depend on various other ports/packages. Which means everything else is installed as 'automatic'. pkg-autoremove(8) removes packages that are 'automatic' and there's nothing depending on them anymore.