On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Guillermo Leira wrote:

Hummm... I'm seeing some pacman -R options that can be very useful to keep the system clean. Maybe I should have used it, and now I wouldn't have these "orphan" packages in my disk.

Yup, I think this is reason. After running 'pacman -R $(pacman -Qtdq)' you can have some more of these orphans.

Guillermo Leira wrote:

I'm not a programmer, so I can't submit code, but it would be nice if pacman would say "Installed as a dependency of: package-name", or something similar. It's just a suggestion.

If a package is removed without its dependencies, those dependencies also lose the pointer to the package that once pulled them in. Note that this relation is not hardcoded, which makes sense: packages may depend on others with a lower bound on the version needed, but any version thereafter will do. Nonetheless storing the "original" package name+version could be done, maybe in an additional field to avoid the need of updating the "dep: name+version" field each time a new version is installed.

Hummm... I'm seeing some pacman -R options that can be very useful to keep the system clean. Maybe I should have used it, and now I wouldn't have these "orphan" packages in my disk.

pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq) The "s" means (from the man page): Remove each target specified including all of their dependencies, provided that (A) they are not required by other packages; and (B) they were not explicitly installed by the user. This operation is recursive and analogous to a backwards --sync operation, and helps keep a clean system without orphans. If you want to omit condition (B), pass this option twice. You can make this even more aggressive by using "pacman -Rcs". I used for i in $(pacman -Qtdq); do pacman -Rs $i;done because there are packages I want to keep. Without the for loop, pacman will remove the whole bunch, with it I get the confirmer question one by one. clemens