Three QT 6 Programs Consistently Installed on Minimal Gentoo

[mudspitease]

Does anyone know where these programs come from? How do I find which ones are bringing them in (and no respecting the global USE flags? Can I mask the packages without breaking everything...? (haha)

Qt 6 QDBusViewer
Qt 6 Linguist
Qt 6 Assistant

I am a new user of Gentoo, experimenting with hardened systemd desktop with i3/sway (I've gone between X and Wayland, trying to figure out which programs pull them in.

No matter how minimal I try to make my setup, these programs always come up, even with a -KDE -gt6 flag in my make.conf.

[NeddySeagoon]

mudspitease,

Welcome to gentoo.

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emerge -cav <package1> <package2> <package3>

will rip them out or tell you what depends on them.
Once you know that, you can investigate if the dependency is hidden behind a USE flag, if so are you willing to forgo setting that USE?
If its a hard dependency, you need to give up that package too.

[asturm]

No matter how minimal I try to make my setup, these programs always come up, even with a -KDE -gt6 flag in my make.conf.

USE flags can only exist where their functionality is optional. You'll have one or more packages installed where this is non-optional.

And USE="-KDE" wouldn't work anyway.

[Chiitoo]

Additionally, if the package name is not known, one can use, for example:

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emerge --pretend "file path"

or

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equery belongs "file path or command"

[Ionen]

USE="-assistant -widgets" on dev-qt/qttools "would" remove all three of these, albeit can only do that if no packages depend on these USE though.

Do not disable USE=widgets globally, it's not that simple of a USE.

Unfortunately qttools is unable to build USE=assistant's libQt6Help without USE=widgets at the moment, thus the reason to disable it as well (some packages need libQt6Help though). USE=widgets is also needed to get libQt6UiTools that "some" packages need.

These GUI applications are very very small though (the libraries do the heavy lifting), I imagine you're just annoyed that the .desktop files makes these appear in your desktop menus. The ebuild *could* just "rm" these applications+.desktop with a USE=gui if we really wanted, albeit we have build them either way and have to pull all dependencies so it's also kind of silly without notable space saving.

[wjb]

No matter how minimal I try to make my setup, these programs always come up

Its not obvious what "always come up" means - it would be useful to see the command and the actual output. The bit that's confusing me is that qtassistant and qtdbusviewer are masked qt5 packages with no equivalents for qt6.

[Hu]

Speaking as someone who has a somewhat reduced system (no DE), none of the packages the OP cites come up for me. Thus, I question whether OP's system is really "Minimal."

[Chiitoo]

The bit that's confusing me is that qtassistant and qtdbusviewer are masked qt5 packages with no equivalents for qt6.

They were split packages from qttools for qt5, but splitting them out for qt6 ended up being too silly for the time being, so they are now part of the single qttools package.

[Banana]

mudspitease, please provide the output of the command emerge --info

[dmpogo]

Additionally, if the package name is not known, one can use, for example:

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emerge --pretend "file path"

or

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equery belongs "file path or command"

You can do

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equery depends  name-of-the-package

and it will list everything that potentially depends on the package

Saying that, I thought linquist and assistant as separate packages are Qt5 only ? And for Qt6 they are USE flags for qttools ?

[Hu]

You can do

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equery depends  name-of-the-package

and it will list everything that potentially depends on the package

The "potentially" part tends to confuse people rather than be helpful, which is why Neddy suggested emerge --depclean --ask --verbose, since that restricts itself to describing dependencies that are active. The equery depends form will mention any dependencies that could apply with the right USE flags, without checking whether the active USE flags would trigger that dependency.

[Unute]

These GUI applications are very very small though (the libraries do the heavy lifting), I imagine you're just annoyed that the .desktop files makes these appear in your desktop menus. The ebuild *could* just "rm" these applications+.desktop with a USE=gui if we really wanted, albeit we have build them either way and have to pull all dependencies so it's also kind of silly without notable space saving.

I know this is an old post. Putting this here in case it's helpful to anyone down the road. This was definitely my situation, I was just annoyed at the desktop files making them show as apps in my menu. So I found this and this from the arch wiki which solved my problem. Basically just copy the desktop file to the user application folder in home (~/.local/share/applications/) then add NoDisplay=true to the file.

For me it was dev-qt/qttools which is a build dependency for a bunch of my KDE packages that pulled in QT linguist, and assistant which I didn't want to see. Since I need them as build depedencies, hiding the desktop files is enough for me. Otherwise, I end up stuck in a weird situation where portage can't resolve the ebuild dependencies, but merges binaries just fine (since they don't need build dependencies installed).

[Elserjo]

Initially, I didn’t want to bring up this thread (necro bump). However, I see that I’m not the only one concerned about this issue. I came up with a very simple portage hook in post_pkg_postinst phase. I’ll leave it here.

It just removes all qt desktop files and icons.

Leave this file in /etc/portage/env/dev-qt/qttools

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desktopEntries=(
"/usr/share/applications/linguist.desktop"
"/usr/share/applications/assistant.desktop"
"/usr/share/applications/designer.desktop"
"/usr/share/applications/qdbusviewer.desktop"
)

desktopIcons=(
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/linguist.png"
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/assistant.png"
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/designer.png"
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/qdbusviewer.png"
)

function post_pkg_postinst()
{
    for entry in "${desktopEntries[@]}"; do
        if [[ -f "${entry}" ]]; then
            rm -v "${entry}"
            elog "Removing desktop entry ["${entry}"] from qttools..." 
        fi
    done

    for entry in "${desktopIcons[@]}"; do
        if [[ -f "${entry}" ]]; then
            rm -v "${entry}"
            elog "Removing icon ["${entry}"] from qttools..." 
        fi
    done
}

Then rebuild a package:

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emerge --ask --oneshot qttools

Or you can write portage hook just like Unute suggests.

[Hu]

It looks like you reinvented INSTALL_MASK. Was that feature not sufficient for removing the unwanted files?

[Elserjo]

It looks like you reinvented INSTALL_MASK. Was that feature not sufficient for removing the unwanted files?

exactly

[Hu]

In what way was INSTALL_MASK insufficient?

[Elserjo]

In what way was INSTALL_MASK insufficient?

Nope, i have just forgotten about INSTALL_MASK

[Unute]

This is the first I am hearing about INSTALL_MASK (I am very new). Seems like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Thank you. I found brief mention of it on the Portage man page, but can’t find a gentoo wiki page on it. Seems like maybe a bit of a niche feature.

[b11n]

This is the first I am hearing about INSTALL_MASK (I am very new). Seems like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Thank you. I found brief mention of it on the Portage man page, but can’t find a gentoo wiki page on it. Seems like maybe a bit of a niche feature.

Huh, that is a little concerning. While it's not worthy of a page of its own, it deserves a better treatment than only turning up incidentally on a few corner cases. I'll try to get around to writing about it, thanks.

[Unute]

This is the first I am hearing about INSTALL_MASK (I am very new). Seems like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Thank you. I found brief mention of it on the Portage man page, but can’t find a gentoo wiki page on it. Seems like maybe a bit of a niche feature.

Huh, that is a little concerning. While it's not worthy of a page of its own, it deserves a better treatment than only turning up incidentally on a few corner cases. I'll try to get around to writing about it, thanks.

Now that I know it exists I can search by keyword on the wiki and find all the articles that show how to use it. There’s mention of using it in the freeing disk space page for example. But yeah maybe the handbook should have a small part about it in the advanced features of Portage or something like that. With just a simple use case example like the one on this forum thread.

[Zucca]

I'll try to get around to writing about it

Thank you.