Vim pulling in xorg dependencies in Gentoo

Today I went to update one of my Gentoo servers, and noticed that it wanted to pull in a bunch of xorg dependencies. This is a simple music server without any type of graphical environment, so I don’t really want any xorg libraries or other GUI components installed. Looking through the full output, I couldn’t see a direct reason that these components were now requirements.

To troubleshoot, I started adding packages to /etc/portage/package.mask, starting with cairo (which was the package directly requesting the ‘X’ USE flag be enabled). That didn’t get me very far as it still just indicated that GTK+ needed to be installed. After following the dependency chain for a bit, I noticed that something was pulling in libcanberra and found that the default USE flags now include ‘sound’ and that vim now had it enabled. It looks like this USE flag was added between vim-8.1.1486 and vim-8.1.1846.

For my needs, the most straightforward solution was to just remove the ‘sound’ USE flag from vim by adding the following to /etc/portage/package.use:

# grep vim /etc/portage/package.use 
app-editors/vim -sound

3 comments

    • toralf on Sunday, 15 September 2019 at 07:13
    • Reply

    /me assume you use a desktop profile (where “sound” is enabled)?

      • Zach on Monday, 16 September 2019 at 11:23
        Author
      • Reply

      Actually on this host, I’m not using a desktop profile:
      apollo # emerge --info
      Portage 2.3.71 (python 3.6.9-final-0, default/linux/amd64/17.1, gcc-9.2.0, glibc-2.29-r4, 5.1.12-gentoo x86_64)
      =================================================================

  1. “emerge –tree” tells you the dependency tree, hopefully decipharable. 🙂

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