A while back I installed the texlive-meta package, which installs a lot of LaTeX packages. I did not actually remember which package it was, so I went up the tree of “removing [package a] breaks depencey required by [package b]” until I got to texlive-meta, which I then deleted via yay -Rns. To my knowledge this should delete all dependencies, which are all these other texlive packages. These packages are still on my system however, while texlive-meta is not and removing them all manually is quite a bother, so is there any way to delete them all at once if deleting texlive-meta with its dependencies didn’t work?
sudo pacman -Rsn texlive-meta should remove everything you installed with the texlive-meta package before…
What you have there left behind?
pacman -Qs texlive
I deleted a few on their own, again with -Rns, after texlive-meta didn’t work, trying to see if they were holding the dependencies somehow, but the remaining are:
local/texlive-basic 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Essential programs and files
local/texlive-bin 2024.2-3
TeX Live binaries
local/texlive-context 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - ConTeXt and packages
local/texlive-doc 2024.2-2
TeX Live - documentation
local/texlive-fontsextra 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Additional fonts
local/texlive-fontsrecommended 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Recommended fonts
local/texlive-fontutils 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Graphics and font utilities
local/texlive-formatsextra 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Additional formats
local/texlive-games 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Games typesetting
local/texlive-humanities 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Humanities packages
local/texlive-langarabic 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Arabic
local/texlive-langchinese 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Chinese
local/texlive-langcjk 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Chinese/Japanese/Korean (base)
local/texlive-langcyrillic 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Cyrillic
local/texlive-langczechslovak 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Czech/Slovak
local/texlive-langenglish 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - US and UK English
local/texlive-langeuropean 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Other European languages
local/texlive-langfrench 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - French
local/texlive-langgerman 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - German
local/texlive-langgreek 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Greek
local/texlive-langitalian 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Italian
local/texlive-langjapanese 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Japanese
local/texlive-langkorean 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Korean
local/texlive-langother 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Other languages
local/texlive-langpolish 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Polish
local/texlive-langportuguese 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Portuguese
local/texlive-langspanish 2024.2-2 (texlive-lang)
TeX Live - Spanish
local/texlive-latex 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - LaTeX fundamental packages
local/texlive-latexextra 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - LaTeX additional packages
local/texlive-latexrecommended 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - LaTeX recommended packages
local/texlive-luatex 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - LuaTeX packages
local/texlive-mathscience 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Mathematics, natural sciences, computer science packages
local/texlive-metapost 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - MetaPost and Metafont packages
local/texlive-music 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Music packages
local/texlive-pictures 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Graphics, pictures, diagrams
local/texlive-plaingeneric 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Plain (La)TeX packages
local/texlive-pstricks 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - PSTricks
local/texlive-publishers 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - Publisher styles, theses, etc.
local/texlive-xetex 2024.2-2 (texlive)
TeX Live - XeTeX and packages
which is, in essence, all of them.
texlive-meta =
texlive-basic
texlive-bibtexextra
texlive-bin
texlive-binextra
texlive-context
texlive-fontsextra
texlive-fontsrecommended
texlive-fontutils
texlive-formatsextra
texlive-games
texlive-humanities
texlive-latex
texlive-latexextra
texlive-latexrecommended
texlive-luatex
texlive-mathscience
texlive-metapost
texlive-music
texlive-pictures
texlive-plaingeneric
texlive-pstricks
texlive-publishers
texlive-xetex
if i run ` sudo pacman -Rsn texlive-meta all are gone… could be you installed something else depending
you can use the groupmnames also:
sudo pacman -Rc texlive texlive-lang
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When you remove a meta package, it will leave everything that depended on it as orphans.
Those can be removed with yay -Yc
It’s a bit like throwing out the empty box the software came in 
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but -Rns will not only remove the meta-package -R would do
No clue exactly what was done here also ;=)
Ah, that works. thanks!
I recall texlive-meta being an AUR package when I installed it, maybe that status changing led to it being different? Or maybe it was an AUR package installing the extra package? Honestly I’m not sure, it was quite a while ago
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