On Gentoo is there a way to find a list of installed packages which doesn’t have other packages depended on them

You can use app-portage/genlop for this.

genlop -l --date some_date

will list all packages merged on or after that date. (You can also specify an end date.)

To get a list of packages suitable for emerge --unmerge, try something like:

genlop -ln --date 2011/10/02 | perl -ne '/>>> (.*)/ and print " =$1";'

Do double-check that list before actually unmerging, removing system packages by accident is not fun.

Another way of getting a list of things merged after a given date is looking at the BUILD_TIME saved in the portage database.

#!/bin/bash
stime=$(date -d "$1" +%s)

for dir in /var/db/pkg/*/* ; do
    if [ -f $dir/BUILD_TIME ] ; then
        btime=$(<$dir/BUILD_TIME)
        if [ $btime -ge $stime ] ; then
            package=$(basename $dir)
            category=$(basename $(dirname $dir))
            echo $category/$package
        fi
    fi
done

Call this with a date (i.e. ./script "2001/09/30 21:32") and you'll get a list of packages merged since that date.

Portage doesn't store whether a merge was a new install or an update in its database. You could reconstruct that information from the emerge.log file assuming you have all your system's history there.

A simpler way of handling all this would be to use package sets. Create a set each time you try out a new recipe, and use that to do your cleanups. (Depclean is still necessary.)

# echo dev-perl/IO-AIO > /etc/portage/sets/my_set
# emerge -a @my_set

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild  N     ] dev-perl/IO-AIO-2.33 

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No] y
>>> Recording @my_set in "world" favorites file...

...
>>> Installing (1 of 1) dev-perl/IO-AIO-2.33
>>> Auto-cleaning packages...

>>> No outdated packages were found on your system.

 * GNU info directory index is up-to-date.
# emerge -a --unmerge @my_set
 * This action can remove important packages! In order to be safer, use
 * `emerge -pv --depclean <atom>` to check for reverse dependencies before
 * removing packages.

>>> These are the packages that would be unmerged:

 dev-perl/IO-AIO
    selected: 2.33 
   protected: none 
     omitted: none 

All selected packages: dev-perl/IO-AIO-2.33

>>> 'Selected' packages are slated for removal.
>>> 'Protected' and 'omitted' packages will not be removed.

Would you like to unmerge these packages? [Yes/No] 

On way is to use equery's depends function to get the list of things that depend on a package.

# equery depends perl

If you want to rebuild all of them, try something like:

# emerge -a --oneshot `equery depends perl|awk '{print " ="$1}'`

You'll have issues with that if you have packages installed that were removed from the portage tree, so a sync and world update beforehand is a good idea.

For this specific case, you might also want to look at app-admin/perl-cleaner - it has specific features to rebuild perl modules.