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Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state



On 5/29/20 10:32 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:

John Hasler wrote:
Victor writes:
But *many* people do install productivity tools, office tools, games,
developer environments separately after the install, and then regret
it and wish to get rid of them cleanly.
What does

      apt remove --purge <unwanted package> ; apt autoremove

not do that you want done?
Unfortunately it does not know what packages are unwanted, nor
do I (the user) to tell it.

We are all familiar with the situation when after a long period of
usage, a system becomes full of software which we once installed for
some purpose and then abandoned or disused. A gentle hint on what is an
<unwanted package> would be very much appreciated at such moments.

Maybe the high-level package management software (aptitude?) is better
at that?

Of course, in any serious server environment, one is likely to have lots of software that was NOT installed through dpkg or apt - ranging from stuff installed directly from tarballs, to local configurations & scripts.

As far as I can tell, the only way to get to a "pristine" system, is to rebuild from scratch.

Miles Fidelman




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown


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