[FAQF] SA5: Things to not unmerge or remove.

unixownz · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 31

Hey.. Ya.. I am an uber n00b..
I never looked to see what the package glibc did...
OH my..

I was trying to play a game that said it needed glibc2.1.
So, I assumed that glibc was never installed, so I just emerged the most recent version.. glibc2.2... The game gave the same error, and looking at the ebuilds, I noticed that glibc2.1 was no longer apart of the ebuilds.. So I just said, why waste space? and unmerged my glibc2.2 file...

>>>OMG !! >>
THINGS NOT TO UNMERGE

My system can not do ANY COMMAND.. BASH TCSH.. all shells can not be found... ... so I can not emerge back in...

I still have the installcd... so I can boot off of that... but.... what do i do ???

HELP ! ( I dont want to reinstall everything.. it too forever to get everything up)

EDIT:
Made thread into FAQ Feedback for [url=][/url].
Changed title from "THINGS NOT TO UNMERGE !! DOH !! HELP !! DOH SOME MORE !".

rac · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 3:59 am Post subject:

In the future, either turn on the buildpkg feature in /etc/make.conf, or make sure you emerge critical packages with the -b flag. That having been said, Lost GCC, or How to emerge GCC without GCC discusses a similar issue, and some of the techniques should be adaptable to repairing glibc as well. Good luck.
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unixownz · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 31

Thx

I read the GCC file, and went searching through all my directrions to cat the CONTENTS of the glibc directory.. but I cant find it.. I looked everywhere... Where is it located? I can only find glib and glibc in the tmp directory..

What should I do ?

rac · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 5:17 am Post subject:

You can either boot from a rescue CD and look for it there, or extract it out of a stage tarball.
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unixownz · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 31

unixownz · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 31

I know perl is usually installed by default... but not on the
boot cd... anyway around formating ?

rac · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 8:56 pm Post subject:

Hmm...no perl on the install CD, and the one on your hard disk won't work because glibc is gone, eh? Unfortunately, the only think I can think of now is to unpack a stage 1 tarball across your root partition. When you have some time, you will probably want to reemerge glibc and "emerge -e system".
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For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

unixownz · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 31

Hey rac

thanks soo much for all the help. at least I dont have to format. Since the server was going to be down anyway I will emerge -e system over night or two.. hhehe...

Next time I will be more careful and definately will use emerge -b and that package builder you were talking about.

Is there anything else I can do that 's a big no no and will screw me ?
Because I want to know now, so I can avoid them in the future..

with all these blunders, I have been able to help out others that pm me.. hehe I learn the hard way for everything..

Once more tho, thank you.

rac · Posted: Thu Nov 14, 2002 3:26 am Post subject: Re: hey rac

unixownz · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 31

Thx..

Oh here is the update..
My comp = hosed... Nothing worked anymore after I remergged the glic files.. and the emerge -e system..

Its ok...
I am formatting right now..
.. I am learning linux tho...
the hard way...

Thanks for all your help rac :wink:

Edgaer · Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 10:06 pm Post subject:

Well while we're talking about things one shouldn't unmerge, don't unmerge grep. Basically what happens is that, the configure scripts that all packages (including grep) use to configure the compile make use of grep. I'm not sure if you can compile it manually as suggested in this thread will work but basically the only way I had to fix things was to download the redhat grep executables from my school's lab server and put those in my path to remerge grep.

And those interested in a link, for my experiences with unmerging grep (and those that haven't figured out that I've linked to it already :wink:

) here it is,
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=10343&highlight=grep
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dberkholz · Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2003 10:01 pm Post subject:

If you completely screw up and remove /var/db/pkg, Cyfred is working on a script to restore it. Check out Restoring /var/db/pkg? for more info.

Once · n00b Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 6

This is what I missed while reviewing the list of packages that depclean was going to take out.

BAD BAD BAD.

I am currently copying over binaries such as cp, ls, rm, from my system backup so that I can get emerge up an running again.

dberkholz · Posted: Sun May 02, 2004 7:38 pm Post subject: Re: more stuff

ronvenema · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 2:17 pm Post subject:

Removing ncurses is also very bad indeed. I innocently removed ncurses in order to change versions. It was not a pretty site. Emerge and other programs went south. I had to untar the stage3 in a temp dir and manually place the ncurses library files in the appropriate directories and was then able to emerge ncurses.
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Frustration leads to knowledge.

toylas · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2007 Posts: 14

Hi All,

I installed gentoo on a 5G partition on a really old comp. The base installation with a few things like (mplayer, evince, xfce,fluxbox, gnuplot and a couple more) grew to over 3G. I moved pportage to a bigger partition following the FAQ given here. Even after that the base installation remains over 2G. I noticed I had both gcc-4.1.1 and gcc-3.3.6, both qt-3.3.8 and qt-4.2.3 installed. Will it be safe to remove the older versions? Also how can I find out other unused packages which are safe to remove?

Thanks,
Tulasi

chithanh · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 2:06 pm Post subject:

please add coreutils to the list (bug 217239 caused some people to unmerge it).

chithanh · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 5:14 pm Post subject:

Please also add portage to the list (bug 244975)

notHerbert · Advocate Joined: 11 Mar 2008 Posts: 2228 Location: 45N 73W

chithanh · Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2009 9:54 am Post subject:

Please add "libpcre if grep is compiled with USE=pcre" to the list.
If you unmerge it, then grep will stop working and emerging grep fails with something like this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Looks like eselect-python belongs in this list

chithanh · Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 2:41 pm Post subject:

Please add dev-libs/gmp to the list (bug 308461)