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Re: safe to purge older versions of installed software?



On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >   this should be an easy one:  on my current (etch) system, there are
> > a number of packages that have more than one version installed.  for
> > example (and from memory), there are at least three versions of gcc
> > installed.  am i safe to remove/purge the older ones?
> >
> >   perhaps a better question is, what is the command to list the
> > packages that depend on a certain package?  in fedora, i'm used to
> > running:
> >
> >   $ rpm -q --whatrequires <package>
> >
>
> aptitude comes in handy here:
>
> aptitude search '~i~D^<package>$'
>
> Since aptitude uses regular expressions search <package> is enclosed
> by ^ and $ to distinguish, e.g., between gcc-4.3 and gcc-4.3-doc.

  i'm not sure what that's supposed to show me.  let me give you an
example from my running lenny system.  if i run:

  $ apt-cache rdepends acpid

i get a list that includes, among other things, two installed
packages -- acpi-support and acpi-support-base -- and a bunch of other
packages that *aren't* installed.

  what i want now is a way to list only the *installed* reverse deps
of acpid.  if i run (as you suggest):

  $ aptitude search '~i~D^acpid$'

i get null output.  what do you *think* i should see?

rday
--


========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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