On Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 12:40:48PM +0000, Bonno Bloksma wrote: > Hi, > > Some of my Debian installations have been done several years ago and then gotten upgrades to a new version. > Like I have a system that started as a Debian 8 machine and is now at Debian 11, > > But... how do I find out when a particular machine started it's life, is there a way to find out? > How do I find out which old libraries, that are probably not being used and... worse no longer getting security updates, are still around? > > The upgrade in itself is not as problem but sometimes old libraries stay around and finding out which libraries can indeed be deleted safe might be too much work. > I can rebuild a Debian machine quite fast and have it up and running with for instance the DHCP service within the hour having all the correct config and other stuff I want. > I would like to know for which systems I realy need to do this. ;-) I would expect that if a Debian installed library stays around, it's because there is no replacement for it. Anyway, you might want to try something along the lines of find /usr/lib -printf "%T+ %p\n" | sort (adjust starting dirs to taste). Then you could investigate with aour package manager's help (e.g. `dpkg -S') where those oldies are coming from. But note that the file dates are most probably their time of build. You coud take all of this from the "other side" and do this to /var/cache/apt/archives, but then you might find entries for packages long gone (if you never had to clean up your cache), so you want again to double-check with your package manager. Cheers -- t
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