Keeping track of automatically installed dependency-only ports

[Nikola Lecic]

On Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:11:25 +1000
Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au> wrote:

> [...]
> On 2007-Jun-15 01:22:38 +0200, Nikola Lecic <nlecic at EUnet.yu> wrote:
> > >At the first place, I think such a situation occurs extremly rare. 
> 
> For an opposing PoV: I often see ports that looks interesting or look
> like a possible solution to a problem and will install the port to
> have a play.  If it turns out that it's not suitable, I would like to
> be able to easily unistall the port and any dependencies it pulled in
> that I didn't already have.  Currently, this is a fairly delicate
> operation and I usually base it on timestamps within /var/db/pkg.

Hmm, are you sure that's the _opposing_ issue? I think that's exactly
what Jeremie Le Hen asked starting this thread. He wants to do
upward-recursive deinstall without accidentally removing ports he
needs. (And yes, your idea to look at the installation time to
distinguish such ports sounds very fine!)

So, would you find useful the idea of adding +NEVERDEINSTALL as I
proposed down the thread? You installed an experimental port A;
pkg_deinstall -R A deinstalls it and all dependencies it introduced,
except:

  * dependencies needed by some other ports (you want them, of course),

  * ports marked with +NEVERDEINSTALL (by including them to the -x
    list), since you want them for some special reason (they were --
    optionally, of course -- marked so when you listed them with
    portinstall on the command line).

Please take a look.

Nikola Lečić