Re: Reliability of deborphan?
On Tuesday 12 December 2006 06:54, andy wrote:
> Hey all
>
> I've stumbled across references to "deborphan" to help maintain my
> system. I've installed it and read the man so think that I have a
> reasonable basic knowledge for what it is meant to do, so have run
> deborphan -zs and have been given a list of files. In theory, I should
> be able to zap these to recycle the electrons and save space. But ...
> how reliable is deborphan in identifying truly-orphaned-safe-to-delete
> files ?
>
> Any body have experience to share?
While it _will_ tell you what packages are orphaned, it won't necessarily tell
you what's safe to delete. In one instance, the Opera browser has (had?)
motif dependencies. However, because Opera is not a Debian package, and
doesn't actually fail to install without the libmotif package, deborphan will
happily tell you that that the libmotif package is on its orphaned (no
dependencies on it) list. Once libmotif is removed, Opera will fail to start.
I haven't used Opera recently, so I don't know whether or not that's still
the case. This wasn't a failure of deborphan though, I'm in the mind-frame
that it was a failure in the Opera package, by not having the dependency on
the libmotif package. IMO, if you're going to package something for a Debian
system, why not do it right.
Another example has been the libdvdcss package from the 'unofficial'
multimedia repository. I always find that on the deborphan list. While true
that is has nothing dependant on it and it would be safe to remove, I've made
the mistake of removing it while removing other things en-mass. Scripting can
be a helpful thing, but in those instances, using something like:
deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge
can leave you in a pickle if you want to watch a dvd on the road and you have
no internet connection to replace the package it removed ;o)
..Rob
--
If she gets one more face lift, she'll have a goatee!
Reply to: