On Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:18:44 +0100 Chris Hofstaedtler <z...@debian.org> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 02, 2024 at 03:16:22PM +0100, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote: > > Given the C codebase and lack of any patches so far I do not see that > > deborphan will ever get these features, and we have other tools > > available that work, do not mess with dpkg internals and are actually > > maintained. > > As people have asked so nicely, and not at all demanding, entitled > or otherwise bossy in this bug report, I've checked around a bit how > APT provides deborphan's functionality today. > > As you all know, apt keeps track of when a package was installed > manually or automatically. This is mostly equivalent to manually > maintaining a deborphan keep file, but automated. apt-mark can be > used to manipulate the manually-installed state. > > On top of that, apt-patterns(7) documents how to select packages, > including on sections, installed status, manually-installed status. > It can also used to select based on package names and regexes. > > Thus, a good approximation of the default deborphan functionality > (no additional options passed) is: > > $ apt-mark auto '~i !~M (~slibs|~soldlibs|~slibdevel|~sintrospection|~sdebug)' > possibly followed by > $ apt autoremove > > If you're using --guess-<something> or --guess-section with > deborphan, you can copy the regex lists from deborphans source. A > lot of them are however outdated and wrong, so you were already in > "living dangerously" territory there. > > And that's it. deborphan does not do any magic and you can do all of > it with apt.
Thanks for making the effort to investigate possible substitutes. However, those are all approximations, not a direct substitute. All of these methods essentially require whitelisting, blacklisting or auto-marking packages for future processing. Meanwhile, deborphan makes good guesses on the fly. Yes, its methods are kinda outdated, its misses support for some of the recent dpkg bells and whistles, but it still does a good enough job for most cases, as attested by its popularity contest rating just below 10k. Sorry, I really think that the correct action is to orphan the package, not remove it. Martin-Éric
