On 07/08/2023 02:22, paulf@quillandmouse.com wrote:
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 17:45:25 -0400 "Juan R.D. Silva" <juan.r.d.silva@gmail.com> wrote:Hi folks, It's time to move from bullseye to bookworm. Based on the previous years experience I've always preferred a fresh install vs. an upgrade, since the freshly installed system always run smoother and was not littered with any old junk left from the old system. However, things might have changed/improved. Thus I decided to ask the community. Could you share your opinion based on personal experience? To install or to upgrade? Mine is fairly simple desktop system for home use. Nothing special, except maybe the need of dual architecture support and Wine to run one special little app.I tend to install packages for testing and forget to uninstall them. I keep a list of packages I want to keep, which I add to, if I want to keep a package installed. With that in mind, I reinstall. This wipes the slate clean of packages I don't want anymore. And as has been mentioned elsewhere, some packages fall off the roster. If you upgrade they'll stay, but if you reinstall, they'll go away, which is often a good thing.
What I've found tends to work quite nicely is to mark as many things as possible as "auto-installed" so that when the thing that depends on them is removed (either by yourself, or by a dist-upgrade) the "cruft" can be cleaned up too.
So, in practice that means that almost all lib* packages are marked as auto (the exceptions being libreoffice, some libperl* packages that I know I want to keep, and optional plugins such as libspa-0.2-bluetooth).
I find that aptitude is helpful in marking the packages; when you have a couple of hours and want to do something mindful, go through the packages you have installed but not auto (search for "~i !~M") and mark them as auto one-by-one. Typically, marking a package as auto won't change the installation state, but if marking a package as auto causes aptitude to want to delete it, ask yourself if you want that package or not.
In summary, "mark as auto" acts as another level of communication to the package manager, saying "these are the packages I care about" vs "I have no opinions about whether these packages are installed or not, use your best judgement".
Paul
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