Re: "deborphan" is a wonderful utility

[Michael Ekstrand <michael@elehack.net>]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   much thanks to whoever suggested "deborphan" recently to help me
> clean out unused libraries.  i've been fairly conservative with it,
> getting rid of libs a bit at a time and making sure things still run.

> p.s.  starting with a server that had just over 600 packages, i'm now
> down to 460, with no loss in functionality.  hopefully, this will make
> that final upgrade as safe as possible.
> 
> p.p.s.  i'm starting to like this debian thing more and more.  :-)

If you like deborphan, you might also like Aptitude's "automatic"
packages.  If a package is marked as Automatically installed (do this
with M), then it will be removed once nothing else depends on it.  I
find it invaluable for keeping my system pruned on a regular basis.
Also, if I'm going through and don't know if I need something, I'll mark
it automatic and see if it goes away.

- Michael