Re: Solutions for the Apache upgrade hell

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org> writes:

> * Running dist-upgrade without --purge will keep packages in 'rc'
>   state around, which a later APT call will not even recognise;
>   you need to manually "dpkg --purge pkg1 pkg2 ..." to get rid
>   of them

I use apt dist-upgrade normally and then, periodically, run:

    dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | awk '{ print $1 }' \
        | xargs dpkg --purge

This is obviously somewhat unsafe.  It would be neat to have a tool that
would do this properly without involving dodgy greps that might match
package names and other obvious issues.  It's not particularly hard to
turn this rune into a real script with error checking, but it would be
nice to have this functionality built into apt somehow, but to not have to
do it at the same time as the upgrade due to issues such as those on this
thread.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>