emerge --depclean wants to remove Portage?! (and more)

[icb410]

Hi,

I've been trying to clean out the cruft from my computer that's been running gentoo for ~3years now. It's the box I've really learned linux on and I know that I probably haven't been maintaining it properly for sometime though I've got it running pretty up-to-date. I've done an emerge -p --depclean to try and get rid of stuff, but some very important packages seem to keep popping up in the list. These include portage, mysql and a host of others that I know other packages are dependent on.

As a first approach to getting rid of these false positives and paring down the list, I took the output and ran each through script to check for dependencies with equery:

[icb410]

equery is stupid.... when checking dependencies, use flags are not checked. Most of the packages portage spit out really are not needed since their use flags are not set in the packages that may have required them. I found that using dep from udept was very good.... still had to modify the output to make sure the right versions were removed, and it removed the fam library needed by all of kde, but re-emerging that was fine and revdep-rebuild took care of the rest.

Still don't know why portage wanted to get rid of itself.... perhaps because I put it in /etc/portage/package.provided to prevent my version from being upgraded?

[Genone]

I'd blame it on that patch or the abuse of package.provided as so far I haven't seen any reports about --depclean breakage on such a scale. So please check with an unpacthed portage version and without any portage installed packages in package.provided to make sure it isn't a portage bug.