A Gentoo question

[Christer Ekholm]

Myles Green <rmg57 at telus.net> writes:

> On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:39:44 -0500
> "David Bandel" <david.bandel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> You can get rid of the tarballs.  That's everything you ever
>> installed.  But now it's installed.  So why do you need it?
>> 
>> Another directory you might want to empty from time to time is
>> /var/tmp.  It will have a portage directory and a cache directory.
>> 
>> Yes, Gentoo gets lots of cruft accumulated on the system.
>> 
>
> Thanks for the quick response David. I was pretty sure I could clean it
> out, I just thought it better to be 100% certain. Is there a config
> file somewhere where one can direct emerge to clean out all this cruft?

Actually sometimes you need them again, if reinstalling something due
to USE changes, or with upgrades on the ebuild only ( -r? ).

app-portage/gentoolkit has a utility called eclean that removes only
the packages never needed again.

ex:

  $ sudo eclean distfiles
  >>> Building file list for distfiles cleaning...
  >>> Cleaning distfiles...
   [  12.6 M ] amarok-1.4.6-rc2.tar.bz2
   [  17.1 M ] amarok-1.4.6_pre20070608.tar.bz2
   [  10.6 K ] binutils-2.17-patches-1.1.tar.bz2
   [   3.8 M ] gnupg-2.0.3.tar.bz2
   [   4.6 M ] ooo-build-2.2.0.2.tar.gz
   [  79.1 K ] portage-2.1.3_rc3.patch.bz2
   [   4.5 M ] subversion-1.4.3.tar.bz2
  >>> Total space that has been freed in distfiles directory: 42.7 M

--
 Christer

PS
 Gentoo has some mailing-lists also.
 http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml
 I think gentoo-users is the best for this kind of questions.