Hi Florian, Alessandro, Florian Zieboll via Dng writes:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 13:10:49 +0200 > Alessandro Vesely via Dng <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Isn't there a way to remove >> packages not used for more than one year? > > Definitely not an approach for automated package removal, but perhaps a > valid starting point for decluttering manually: > > $ find /usr/bin -atime +360 | xargs -l1 apt-file find | sort I hadn't thought of that approach but rather than look at use (for some definition of use), I like to use apt-mark and a judicious set of APT options to keep my systems free of stuff I don't need. That goes a bit like this sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual) followed by looking at what sudo apt auto-remove would like to get rid of. Make sure to say 'n'! Based on the list of potential removals, I sudo apt-mark manual <list packages I want to keep> After iterating a couple of times until I'm happy with the list of stuff that will be removed I finally say 'y' so apt zaps the stuff I don't want/need. The first time around, there will be quite a long list of packages that are candidates for removal. Even without a desktop environment installed the list can be several tens of packages. Look for the "top-level" kind of packages to `apt-mark manual`, things like task-xfce-desktop, so you don't have to add a long list of packages. You can `apt-mark auto` them later and fine-tune your list of manually installed packages. # This is how I whittle down the list of xserver-xorg-video-* packages # that I really need :-) Doing this in phases also gives you a bit of an opportunity to recover from mistakes when you remove a package you actually need without realizing it. Check the /var/log/apt/history.log* files to see what you removed recently if stuff breaks. Options that you might want to pass to that apt auto-remove invocation -o APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant=false -o APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant=false -o APT::Get::Purge=true # Add them to /etc/apt/apt.conf if you want to use these by default. The first is pretty benign. It just removes those packages that are only kept installed because some package has a Suggests: dependency on it. Of course, you might want to keep it. In that case, just say sudo apt-mark manual <package you want to keep> The second option is similar but ups the ante a bit and tries to get rid of packages that are only installed because they are recommended. As for the Suggests:, use apt-mark manual to keep stuff you want/need and get rid of the rest. The third and final option makes sure any configuration files are removed as well. I keep mine version controlled with etckeeper so zapping config files is typically not an issue for me. The git repo has a copy that I can resurrect as needed. If you do not have backups of configuration files that might be removed, you're probably better of not using this option. Hope this helps, -- Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2 FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27 GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13 F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9 Support Free Software https://my.fsf.org/donate Join the Free Software Foundation https://my.fsf.org/join _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
