Re: Reliability of deborphan?
On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 11:54:55AM +0000, 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?
>
I tried deborphan and debfoster before I tried aptitude. I found
aptitude far superior. Use aptitude in the UI mode (not the command
line mode), set it to not automatically install recommends or suggests,
and go down the list of installed packages and mark anything that you
don't specifically want installed as automaic (toggle with M and m).
When you think that you have everything right, hit 'g' for go and it
will give you a list of packages to remove (and suggests others but
doesn't select them). If there is anything on this list that you
missed, mark it here as manual. When you're happy, hit 'g' again and it
will remove extraneous packages.
After this, it will manage the packages with no further detail tweaking
like this. Its great.
Doug.
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