On Mon, January 26, 2009 18:35, Grant wrote: >>> What do you guys think of this? Do you know of a good cruft removal >>> script? >> >> Yep, there's quite good one in gentoo itself. >> >> Basically, you'll need to write a short config for it, consisting of >> lines like "cruft name", "cruft src uri" and a few more lines if you'll >> need to pass some extra parameters to configure/make/install. >> It'll build the package in a sandbox, then transfer it to destination, >> memorizing every change it did and preventing collisions and config >> overwrites. >> >> Just put that config script into an ebuild file and use portage to >> build it - as simple as it gets ;) > > I suppose you and Jesus are right, but what about cruft removal? Are > you saying Gentoo is 100% cruft-free? I've got a lot of junk in /etc > and especially ~/.*
No. It isn't 100% free. Emerge will only remove the stuff it installed. There's absolutely no way to guarantee that any file in /etc is not needed any longer. Besides that: 1.- YOU created those files, so you are the one that should keep the track of them 2.- They are not part of the package, emerge will only uninstall what it installed, nothing else, I would be very angry if a silly package manager starts deleting files I created by hand. 3.- you might want to install that package again, and you are probably not willing to reconfigure it again 4.- seriously, even three thousand of files in /etc are not a problem. They take a few bytes or several kb at most. You better look at /usr/src or the number of installed games and/or icon themes. In the rest of the three there shouldn't be too much cruft if you stick to portage and don't go installing things by hand around (if you do then you can't blame portage neither). Cruft removers base their actions on guesses. I never felt like those programs really worked at all. If you use one of them you have still to review the final list before removal (that or you are good at making backups, you know). So I don't know what the point is. I would be quicker to clean the tree myself using mc and some bash magic. -- Jesús Guerrero
