Once upon a time Jim McCloskey said... > Tong Sun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > |> Anybody here is as obsessed as I am for a clean > |> system? > |> > |> Looking at the packages I installed, I know there > |> would be lots of them that I will never use. E.g., > > Two of the most useful Debian tools in this regard are `deborphan' and > `debfoster' (both independent packages).
I used to use these tools, but now just use aptitude. aptitude has a command line interface very similar to apt-get, and this is how I use it most of the time. What aptitude has over apt-get is that it remembers what it has automatically installed to satisfy dependencies, so when an automatically installed package is no longer needed when the last package depending on it is removed, aptitude will remove that too. When moving to aptitude, I found the best thing to do was to run the curses interface and mark all installed packages as automatically installed, and then go through the list unmarking packages that I want. At the end of this, you'll end up with a bunch of packages that aptitude wants to remove - these are the no longer needed packages. > One of the reasons that I really like Debian is that it lets me easily > indulge my obsession for having a clean system. This method lets me keep a nice clean system at all times, not just when you run debfoster or deborphan. Every now and then I run the aptitude curses interface and filter out all automatically installed packages to see what I have requested to be installed. I go over this list and get rid of anything I no longer want. Often I'll install packages to see what they're like and forget to remove them afterwards - or I'll stop using some package. My cruft percentage is really low these days. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]