Re: Finding left-over libraries

[Brian Servis <servis@purdue.edu>]

*- On  7 Dec, peter karlsson wrote about "Finding left-over libraries"
> Is there any way in Debian to find out what packages no other packages
> depend on?
> 
> When I install a couple of packages, all the libraries they depend on are
> installed as well, which is quite nice, but the reverse doesn't hold - when
> I remove packages, unnecessary libraries are not removed. Because of this, I
> would like to get a list of packages that no packages depend on (restricted,
> for instance, to packages starting with lib).
> 

Unforunately there is no way to do this cleanly now.  There has been/is
active discussion on this very subject on the the -devel list.  One of
the issues to be concerned with is on a machine used for development
where nothing directly depends on a lib*-dev package except at build
time when you need to link to the headers. 

There is a Debian package called cruft that can do some system searching
and can give you a very rough idea of file usage. 
 

Brian Servis
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