Re: Solutions for the Apache upgrade hell

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2014-07-14 18:52 +0200, Russ Allbery wrote:

> 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.

Note that aptitude can already do this, this is what I run regularly:

# aptitude purge "~c"

Getting at least some of aptitude's extensive search patterns[1] into apt
would certainly be very useful.

Cheers,
       Sven


1. http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s04s05.html