Re: Packages.

[Eduardo M KALINOWSKI <ekalin@gmail.com>]

Nuno Magalhães wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Whenever i install Debian, i always use the netinst and select nothing
> but the base system.

Same here.

>  Then it's apt al the way: first X, then a
> lightweight WM plus whatever i need. However, even with a "minimal"
> install there are always a bunch of packages that i didn't choose and
> that (apparently) aren't used by any other package.
>   

This did not happen to me, though.

> This time i decided to nstall X from the installer menu, so i got
> X+GNOME. I still had to work around the xorg.conf to get it working
> (framebuffer). The thing is, i'm allergic to unused packages and i
> dislike big desktop enviroments like GNOME or KDE. And i know that if
> i do apt-get remove --purge gnome* there will still be leftovers, like
> Evolution.
>
> I don't think neither apt nor aptitude (or even synaptic, another
> usual leftover) have this, but is there a way to know if a package is
> depended upon? Automagically removing it if not? Actually my favourite
> is apt, i dislike the other two.
>   

deborphan shows packages that are orphaned, that is, nothing depends on 
them. I'm not sure if it can automatically remove them, but that's easy 
to do anyway. However, I'd do that via aptitude, see below.

> I'm going through the list of installed packages and their
> descriptions in the debian site, i even have a fortune-cookies
> package! Wtf? And i skipped all the lib* and x* ones... How can i get
> rid of everything gnome?
>   

What I recomend is to use aptitude, and press M (or was it m? well, 
whatever) to mark the packages you feel you don't need as automatically 
installed. Then if nothing depends on them, they will be removed. You 
might want to press 'l' and enter something like this

!~pimportant!~prequired!~M

to get a list of packages that are not marked as automatically installed 
(that is, they are not a dependency of something else that got 
automatically pulled in) and are not marked 'important' or 'required'. 
And aptitude lets you see quickly what a package is for.

Another thing that you can try is simply ask the package to be removed. 
If you get broken packages or other things are being removed, then the 
package is needed by something else.


--
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't
recognize them.

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
ekalin@gmail.com
http://move.to/hpkb