Safely uninstall a package in Gentoo

emergegentoopackage-managementsoftware installation

I wanted to uninstall a specific package in Gentoo and browsed through the emerge man page. I found the --unmerge option:

WARNING: This action can remove important packages! Removes all
matching packages. This does no checking of dependencies, so it may
remove packages necessary for the proper operation of your system.Its
arguments can be atoms or ebuilds. For a dependency aware version of
–unmerge, use –depclean or –prune.

However, I'd like emerge to check whether the package I want to uninstall is required by any other installed package in the system. --depclean and --prune don't provide that functionality:

  • --depclean removes packages that were installed as dependencies, but are not needed anymore
  • --prune "removes all but the highest installed version of a package from your system"

Is there no dependency-checking version of --unmerge?

Best Answer

I don't think depclean works the way you described. Without any arguments it does, but if you pass it a package name it works like unmerge with an additional dependency check. From emerge(1):

Depclean serves as a dependency aware version of --unmerge. When given one or more atoms, it will unmerge matched packages that have no reverse dependencies. Use --depclean together with --verbose to show reverse dependencies.

I always use --depclean (-c) to unmerge individual packages; it works fine

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