Re: Useless cruft in /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de>]

bcollins@debian.org (Ben Collins) writes:

> On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 12:38:21AM +0100, Paul Seelig wrote:
> > 
> > Is it planned to get rid of package entries for purged packages in
> > /var/lib/dpkg/status anytime in the future?  I don't see the point for
> > keeping entries which refer to packages which don't even exist
> > anymore.  In contrary it would probably(?) slightly speed up dpkg
> > actions (could probably be neglected though) when this useless cruft
> > could be removed.  At least it wouldn't confuse users about the
> > availability of non-existing packages.
> 
> dpkg --help
> 
> ....
>   dpkg --forget-old-unavail                forget uninstalled unavailable pkgs
> ....
> 
Yes, thanks to the man pages i was already well informed about this
one but it doesn't solve the problem because after applying this:

---------------- snip ------------------
[root]~ > dpkg --forget-old-unavail
[root]~ > grep "Status: purge ok not-installed" /var/lib/dpkg/status | wc -l
    422
---------------- snip ------------------

This means, that still 422 entries for purged packages stay in this
file.  Doesn't it strike anyone as kind of strange that *purging* a
package results in such left overs?  What is the point of purging a
package if it actually doesn't purge all of a package's traces from
a given system?

If it is not planned to go away sometime in the future i'd probably
bother writing some shell code to filter out this stuff via a script
in "/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/" enabling a real purge as i'd like to see it.

                Thanks and Happy New Year to everyone! P. *8^)
-- 
   ------------ Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de> -------------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------