Re: Spring clean

[Max Hyre <max@hyre.net>]

Pál Csányi wrote:
> 2007/9/29, andy <geek_show@dsl.pipex.com>:
>> Can someone recommend a newbie-friendly easy, and safe 
way of cleaning
>> house so that I can retain those packages that I need 
(and want) but can
>> clear out the dust bunnies, etc..?
>
> If you use aptitude, or synaptic then you must to 
manually select
> there packages you want to purge. After you have purged those
> packages, you should to purge orphaned packages, I think. 
For this you
> may to use 'sudo aptitude purge $(deborphan)' command.

   For the inverse operation (select what you want to keep, 
discard everything they don't depend on) check out 
`debfoster'.  The first time you run it, it asks about 
roughly every package you've got installed, which is rather 
tedious.  Thereafter, it uses that info to weed out stuff 
you don't want.  I suspect that `want' != `need', so 
ill-advised choices may hose your system.

	Best wishes,

		Max Hyre


------------------------------------------------------------
Description: Install only wanted Debian packages
 debfoster is a wrapper program for apt and dpkg.  When 
first run, it
 will ask you which of the installed packages you want to keep
 installed.
 .
 After that, it maintains a list of packages that you want 
to have
 installed on your system.  It uses this list to detect 
packages that
 have been installed only because other packages depended 
on them.  If
 one of these dependencies changes, debfoster will take 
notice, and
 ask if you want to remove the old package.
 .
 This helps you to maintain a clean Debian install, without old
 (mainly library) packages lying around that aren't used 
any more.