Re: How to disk cleanup after apt-get upgrade/install/remove cycles?

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

(Please set your mailer to wrap lines at 72 columns.)

Ramasubramanian Ramesh <rramesh@ti.com> writes:

> Often one is not sure of the choices and strength of
> packages/utilities and tend to install multiple utilies for the same
> purpose. For example I have about 3 or 4 cd players and assortment
> of mp3 palyers etc. Sooner or later you see that a lot of left over
> packages exists in your system that you no longer use.
>
> I am wondering if there is a fool-proof way of cleaning up that
> eliminates all unused packages.  Specifically, if I installed
> package A that brought in packages B C and D due dependencies. Is
> there a way to find out that B C and D are no longer in the
> dependency list of any packages after removal of say A. This will
> allow me to systematically remove all unwanted packages.

I'd suggest using aptitude as a package manager.  If you mark a
package for installation inside aptitude (or install a package from
the command line using 'aptitude install'), aptitude will mark
packages that are only installed because they're dependencies as
auto-installed, and if you remove the package, it will later remove
those.  You can also add or remove the "auto-installed" mark by hand.

So I'd:

(1) Install aptitude.
(2) Start aptitude.
(3) Find packages that you think you don't need.  Press 'M' (capital
    m) on each of them in the listing.  They might turn purple and
    also gain a 'd'; that just means aptitude wants to uninstall it.
    You can also press '-' to remove (or '_' to purge) a package if
    you know you don't want it, '+' to install a package, or 'm' to
    clear the auto-installed mark.
(4) Press 'g'.  aptitude will display a summary of what it wants to
    do.
(5) Press 'g' again; aptitude will actually do it.

Pressing 'q' will always back you up to the previous screen; from the
main screen, it'll exit aptitude.  You probably want to mark every
package in the 'devel', 'interpreters', 'libs', 'libdevel', 'oldlibs',
'perl', and 'python' sections as auto-installed, unless you know
otherwise (you're probably a developer of some sort).  (Some of those
sections only exist in testing/unstable, not stable.)

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell