Re: Finding unused packages
On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 10:47:47PM -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
> Noah Meyerhans <noahm@debian.org> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 03:00:34PM +0200, Matijs van Zuijlen wrote:
> > > > Some time ago, I've read somewhere about a tool that can find installed
> > > > debian packages that are not used, based on atime of files that belong to
> > > > the packages.
> > >
> > > I think you're looking for popularity-contest
> >
> > No, popularity contest is a means to report to Debian which packages are
> > the most popular (i.e. what packages are installed on the most
> > machines).
>
> The script /usr/bin/popularity-contest simply generates a list of
> packages installed on the system, ordered from most recently used to
> least recently used. Running
>
> $ popularity-contest | grep '<OLD>'
>
> will give a list of packages popularity contest considers old based on
> atimes (more than a month old). This is exactly what the original
> poster was looking for.
>
> Popularity contest can be configured to participate in the public
> survey, but it's not necessary and is definitely not the sole purpose
> of the package.
Wow, this is a great tool. Talk about the law of unexpected
consequences. I ran this on my machine, and I can happily do away with
so many packages. Of course, the dependencies would have to be kept in
mind.
Perhaps writing a script to run "apt-cache showpkg" or "apt-cache
search" on the output of popularity-contest would point the packages
that are not dependencies and that haven't been used in a while.
-Andy
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