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Missing the point in package removal
Missing the point in package removal
Posted Dec 27, 2006 16:50 UTC (Wed) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848)Parent article: Predictions for 2007 (and how I did on 2006) (LinuxWorld)
Surely many of the earlier posts are missing the point of the original article. What is needed is a mechanism to detect which packages *you don't use*, not those which are orphaned. So your distro may include Firefox, IceWeasel, Konqueror and Lynx, but you may only ever use one. Not to mention all the other applications and utilities that you have never even heard of. By removing the superfluous ones, there's no need to patch them.
Of course, to be really valuable, such a clean-up utility should be looking at the last-access times, and also have some smarts built in, so it can let you choose which you don't want. And also which would be a really bad idea to get rid of (hey, I never run fsck, I'll delete it!)
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Missing the point in package removal
Posted Dec 27, 2006 20:57 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
Considering that all previous posters concentrate on the prediction highlighted by LWN and ignore some more interesting predictions, such as net neutrality, it would be pretty safe to conclude that they didn't read the article at all.Looking back (which is admittedly easier than looking forward), it's quite unreasonable to predict a major change in the way how distributions are organized one year from now unless there is an already an active effort in that direction.
A way to suggest unused packages to remove
Posted Jan 3, 2007 5:06 UTC (Wed) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link]
You could build a tool to give you that information based on Debian's popularity-contest package, and the existing package priorities. Use the popularity-contest log file to determine which packages were not used, and suggest removal of all those with priority "optional" and "extra".
A way to suggest unused packages to remove
Posted Jan 3, 2007 5:36 UTC (Wed) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link]
Here's the really quick version:
grep '<OLD>' /var/log/popularity-contest | grep -v ' lib' | cut -d' ' -f3
Adjust to your desire.