Question about orphaned packages

Support Software & Applications
1

I’m still kind of a noobish Linux user. I know orphans are packages that are not used by anything, but sometimes it’s really confusing if it’s safe to do or not.

I installed Ungoogled Chromium from source the other day (through Pamac, AUR iirc), but I didn’t remove orphans afterwards because I forgot (I typically do it after a few installs that I do on my own). Today I installed Open JDK (pacman -S jre-openjdk), and then used “sudo pacman -Rsn $(pacman -Qqdt)”, and there were some packages that I wasn’t sure about, for example “gc” (which according to Google is a garbage collector for C and C++), “make” and a few others. I know it’s typically safe to remove orphans, but I’m totally unsure if I should proceed in this case. I know stuff like “make” will be useful if I were to build more programs from source, but I don’t typically do that (the Chromium one was a mistake I didn’t realize because I clicked install and had to leave for a few hours, came back seeing I installed it from source, lol).

This is the list of orphans I can remove. Is it 100% safe to do or should I just not remove any of those?

checking dependencies...
:: gnutls optionally requires guile: for use with Guile bindings
:: graphviz optionally requires guile: guile bindings

Packages (14) gc-8.2.0-2  guile-2.2.7-2  m4-1.4.19-1  autoconf-2.71-1  automake-1.16.5-1
              bison-3.8.2-1  flex-2.6.4-3  gn-0.1956.fc295f3a-1  gperf-3.1-3  lld-13.0.1-1
              make-4.3-3  ninja-1.10.2-1  patch-2.7.6-8  pkgconf-1.8.0-1

Total Removed Size:  83,69 MiB

Thank you in advance.

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2

If you frequently use AUR build scripts you can install the base-devel package group and then some the packages you see here will not be shown as orphans.

sudo pacman -Syu base-devel --needed
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3

That is good to know. I did find that somewhere as well, but it was not explained exactly what it is for. Thank you.

However I’m still kind of unsure about the packages listed as orphans - some of them seems to me as they’d be necessary for certain things (but then again, orphans are unused packages that can freely be removed, hence my confusion), so is it fine to remove them all? I don’t know if Pacman is always right or if it can be wrong sometimes and classify something really important as an orphan.

4

All of the orphans listed are only required for building packages.

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