Re: Reliability of deborphan?
On 12.12.06 11:54, andy wrote:
> 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 ?
Well, deborphan by default (even with -zs options) prints all packages in
sections libs and oldlibs that no package depends on.
However, there may be packages in such sections, that are being used, e.g.
pam libraries which are used in /etc/pam.d/* configs, like libpam-cracklib.
Also, there may be other documentation and support packages that should not
be removed. deborphan can give you good hint which packages to remove, but
you should know what you are doing and double-check everything.
There is nice tool debfoster, which walks all packages, asks you which do
you want to have installed, and removes all packages you answered 'n' for
and are not required by other packages you answered 'y'.
--
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