Re: how to tell what packages are unused on a debian server?
On Fri, 29 Oct 2010, Camaleón wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Oct 2010 06:12:55 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> > just a cleanup-related question but on a debian lenny server that
> > i've inherited, i'm curious to know which packages have no value
> > whatever and that i can delete. i recall there's a utility that
> > will identify unused libraries but i'm curious about what else i
> > can pinpoint that can be removed.
> >
> > this system is a web/mail server and, since its IP address is
> > assigned statically and another system is responsible for all
> > DNS/DHCP functionality internally, i conclude that i can remove
> > the dhcp-related packages. that's just one example.
>
> Not that fast :-)
screech!!! :-)
> You may have installed packages that are "unused" but "needed" as a
> dependency requirement of another packages that you want to keep.
of course, but any attempt to remove that package would immediately
tell me about the dependency so that's not something that concerns me.
> If you are not facing space problems, I won't touch anything. What
> you could do instead is disabling services you are not using at all,
> that's what I use to do.
oh, i understand all that and i'm working on that. and i never
assumed this would be an easy thing to do. as one other poster
suggested, i can start with "deborphan" and see where that takes me.
and over the next little while, i plan on manually checking the
installed packages and determining whether they have any value.
i was just wondering if there was any cool utility that would scan a
system and based on god-knows-what, simply *suggest* packages that are
apparently unused.
for instance, if a given shared library hasn't been linked in weeks
or months, that's something to look at. if none of the binary
executables in a package have been executed in that long, another
package to examine, that sort of thing.
anyway, i was just curious to see how easy it was to do something
like that. thanks.
rday
--
========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================
Reply to: