return void;

So after using Gentoo for some 5 years now, I’ve learned there are many ways to manage the cruft on my system. I usually use eix and sift through what it shows as installed. When I find something that I don’t think is being used anymore, I check it with equery depends. If everything looked fine, I removed the package and checked the system by using revdep-rebuild.

There is an option (-i IIRC) that will show all installed multi-slotted packages. That is, if you have 6 versions of the kernel installed, it will show you them. This is a pain in the ass if you manage 1 system for 4 years as I have. I have not done in install in a very long time, but instead update my system on a near monthly basis using Gentoo’s Portage system. The downside is it has the tendancy to leave old unused crap on your system.

Then I discovered a tool that was handy at detecting old packages, even old slotted/unused packages, and removed them. Udept is a rather satisfying tool to stumble-upon. It is very adept at identifying unused junk and cleaning your system of it. It has options to purge the system, perform a recursive dependency check, prune your world file, and much more. While I’m not entirely sure I want to maintain a slim world file, the rest of the tool’s capabilities are inferior to none. Granted, it collects much of the capability that is already present with the gentoolkit, but those tools are loosely banded. Udept neatly ties all of that up into one sweet package that can help you keep the crap off your riced-out desktop or server. Best of all, it’s in portage.

After running it for the first time, it found about 3 dozen packages that I agreed needed to be removed. Give it a whirl, and enjoy never having to install your OS again.