Re: package management help

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

On 10/16/2011 3:51 AM, Brian wrote:
> On Sat 15 Oct 2011 at 22:00:19 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> 
>> ~$ dpkg -l|grep -i apache
>> rc  apache2.2-common
>> rc  libapache2-mod-php5
>> rc  libapr1
>> rc  libaprutil1
>>
>> What does the 'rc' mean?  The others are apparently completely removed
>> now, but these 4 still show up.  Is there something preventing their
>> total removal?
> 
> The package has been removed but some configuration files remain. They
> are probably in /var/lib/dpkg/info/. 'dpkg --purge' deals with it.

Thanks Brian.  They're now toast.

Possibly worth noting here is that I only use Debian on headless servers.

I'm no package management expert.  I only install packages when I need
new capabilities, or when doing security updates.  I discovered during
this apache2 troubleshooting that I had 1.6GB of .deb files in the apt
package cache.  I did an 'aptitude autoclean' and that cut it down to 430MB.

Is there any good reason to not go ahead and run 'aptitude clean' and
just get rid of all of those?  What purpose do they serve once a package
has been installed?  I can't recall ever reinstalling a package after
I've removed it.  And the only packages I ever manually remove are:

1.  automatically installed junk I don't need
2.  a package that didn't meet expectations

Thanks again for your help.

-- 
Stan