On Feb 16, 2012, at 10:11 AM, Dustin Kirkland wrote: >I asked about this in IRC yesterday, and Colin Watson pointed me to >the computer-janitor utility, which is intended to handle this. >Seconds later, Barry Warsaw told me that computer-janitor should die >:-)
c-j needs attention, but I'm not particularly motivated to give it what it needs. There's basic housekeeping, such as that the code for c-j is sprinkled between the update-manager and the computer-janitor packages, and even more important problems such LP: #458872. What's demotivating though is that in all the discussions we've had about the tool, most people think it's just not user-friendly enough given today's emphasis on software-center. In c-j 2.0, I worked to separate the backend functionality into a dbus service, with gtk and command-line front-ends. I looked at the debian/changelog to refresh my memory, and that implies the work was done during the Lucid cycle, but I think we ended up not landing it until after that LTS release, since my Lucid VM still has c-j 1.13.3. In theory though, this would allow the c-j functionality to be used by any dbus-aware application, so we could fairly easily ditch the current ui (which itself needs love), and improve the cleaning algorithms underneath. >I tried computer-janitor on my desktop, and it seemed to work >okay. But then I tried it on my servers and it failed: > # sudo computer-janitor find > ERROR:dbus.proxies:Introspect error on :1.3:/: >dbus.exceptions.DBusException: >org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Rejected send message, 1 >matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.8" (uid=0 pid=26155 >comm="/usr/bin/python /usr/sbin/computer-janitor find ") >interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable" member="Introspect" >error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination=":1.3" (uid=0 >pid=19905 comm="/usr/bin/python /usr/share/computerjanitor/janitor") This is probably LP: #715707. You don't say what version of Ubuntu your servers are running, but I'm guessing its Lucid < Dustin < Precise. When I run the cli on Precise, I do see all the old kernels targetted for removal, and I don't get this error. > 1) Surely we're not the only Ubuntu users whose /boot or root >partition has filled up with age-old kernels, are we? Clearly not. > 2) Is computer-janitor here to stay, or to be abandoned in favor of >something else? See above. My own preference would be: * Fix the housekeeping bugs by moving the c-j code out of the u-m tree * Fixing the dbus backend by addressing the relevant known bugs * Keeping the c-j cli for non-ui uses * Throw away the current c-j ui and pull that functionality into u-m or s-c > 3) Can we expect computer-janitor to work on command-line only >environments (Ubuntu servers) too? If so, can we get SRUs out so that >it works on older distributions? It can if the dbus service is running. As for SRUs, would you want to see the dbus-based version backported to Lucid (if that's even possible)? > 4) Can we, as a distro, provide and recommend a utility to clean out >specifically old kernels (perhaps aside from cleaning up userspace >cruft a la computer-janitor)? I think we mostly need to decide whether there's anything to salvage in c-j, which I think mostly means the dbus service. If so, then maybe this is something we can explicitly target for 12.10. Cheers, -Barry
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