Re: Obsessed with a clean system
Once upon a time Jim McCloskey said...
> Tong Sun <mlist4suntong@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> |> Anybody here is as obsessed as I am for a clean
> |> system?
> |>
> |> Looking at the packages I installed, I know there
> |> would be lots of them that I will never use. E.g.,
>
> Two of the most useful Debian tools in this regard are `deborphan' and
> `debfoster' (both independent packages).
I used to use these tools, but now just use aptitude.
aptitude has a command line interface very similar to apt-get, and this
is how I use it most of the time. What aptitude has over apt-get is that
it remembers what it has automatically installed to satisfy
dependencies, so when an automatically installed package is no longer
needed when the last package depending on it is removed, aptitude will
remove that too.
When moving to aptitude, I found the best thing to do was to run the
curses interface and mark all installed packages as automatically
installed, and then go through the list unmarking packages that I want.
At the end of this, you'll end up with a bunch of packages that aptitude
wants to remove - these are the no longer needed packages.
> One of the reasons that I really like Debian is that it lets me easily
> indulge my obsession for having a clean system.
This method lets me keep a nice clean system at all times, not just when
you run debfoster or deborphan.
Every now and then I run the aptitude curses interface and filter out
all automatically installed packages to see what I have requested to be
installed. I go over this list and get rid of anything I no longer want.
Often I'll install packages to see what they're like and forget to
remove them afterwards - or I'll stop using some package.
My cruft percentage is really low these days.
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