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Last updated on 2008-06-17.
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> 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., > > kscreensaver ktux xscreensaver kdewallpapers atlantik > atlantikdesigner gnome-games gnome-games-data katomic > kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kdegames > kdegames-card-data kenolaba kfouleggs kgoldrunner > khangman kjumpingcube klickety kmahjongg kmessedwords > kolf konquest kpat ksirtet ksmiletris ksokoban > kspaceduel libgdkcardimage0 libkdegames1 libkpathsea3 > lskat
I had this problem at first. I fixed large amounts of it by:
Use apt-get to install (1) and aptitude to install (2) and (3). Aptitude will bring in enough of the rest of KDE/Gnome to run just about everything: if kcontrol/gnome-control-center can run and the powerset of its "recommends" is installed, everything will run and extra cruft won't be brought in.
When you install other things, in general use "aptitude install" because you usually also want to the recommends; but sometimes to be spare just use "apt-get install", to only get the minimal dependencies. I've found that for the core dev tools I usually want all the recommends but for some of the more exotic dev tools I only want the depends.
William Ballard
> I don't want them, but I have to keep them. This to me > is a huge list.
Sounds like you installed the gnome and kde dependency packages instead of just the packages you wanted, although gnome and kde do tend to bring way too much in with them, both installation wise and extra setting processes overhead. One of the reasons I use fvwm and rxvt, no kde packages and very few gnome ones I couldn't live without.
> When you install other things, in general use "aptitude install" because > you usually also want to the recommends; but sometimes to be spare just > use "apt-get install", to only get the minimal dependencies. I've > found
You can always configure aptitude not to install recommends. Run aptitude with no options to get the ncurses interface, press f10 for menu, then options and dependency handling.
BTW, AFAIK recent aptitude allows you to chose a program for installation, and then when you review packages to install you can dump the recommends without aptitude forcing them down your thought. Or you can also press enter on the package name and see the list of recommends, depends, suggests and which packages depend on any given package and play around with that.
> 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).
Deborphan scans your system for libraries that are not used by any installed package. Use `dpkg —purge' to remove those libraries, and then re-run (the removal of one library will often result in another being orphaned).
Deborphan only removes libraries; the purpose of `debfoster' is to:
`weed unnecessary Debian packages'
(from the man page). It's a more powerful tool than can be described here, but basically, it tells you what package is keeping what other packages installed and provides you with a good basis for the wise use of `dpkg —purge' or `apt-get remove'.
One of the reasons that I really like Debian is that it lets me easily indulge my obsession for having a clean system.
Jim
> 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.
Cameron Hutchison
> are you sure you *need* them? > > if you want to get rid of the packages, you could use "dpkg > --force-dependency <package-name>" if there is some other packages > that want to keep those listed above around. dpkg has all sorts of > different options you can force, see man dpkg.
"dpkg —force-dependency —remove-essential libc6" is an especially fun one to use to get rid of clutter. :-)
Seriously though, be careful forcing the removal of *anything* unless you're sure you know what depends on it. (Not that Matt was suggesting otherwise. Just the voice of experience talking. :-)
Jacob
> I don't want them, but I have to keep them. This to me > is a huge list.
You do not have to keep them.
> I used to remove all files in unwanted rpm packages in > RH, leaving only empty shells in the system. Anybody > has done similar things in Debian?
olly@linda$ sudo apt-get -u remove kbattleship Password: Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: kbattleship kde kde-amusements kdegames 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 1 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 963kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n Abort. olly@linda$ dpkg -L kde /. /usr /usr/share /usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc/kde /usr/share/doc/kde/README.Debian /usr/share/doc/kde/copyright /usr/share/doc/kde/changelog.gz
olly@linda$ dpkg -L kde-amusements /. /usr /usr/share /usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc/kde-amusements /usr/share/doc/kde-amusements/README.Debian /usr/share/doc/kde-amusements/copyright /usr/share/doc/kde-amusements/changelog.gz
olly@linda$ dpkg -L kdegames /. /usr /usr/share /usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc/kdegames /usr/share/doc/kdegames/AUTHORS /usr/share/doc/kdegames/README /usr/share/doc/kdegames/copyright /usr/share/doc/kdegames/changelog.gz /usr/share/doc/kdegames/changelog.Debian.gz
So you see that those three reverse dependencies are actually dummy packages. Their only purpose is to cause other packages to be installed.
You can safely allow them to be removed, so far as the current operation of your system is concerned. It might in the future lead to some hiccups; for example, if a new and necessary dependency were to be added to kde, you would miss it. Arguably, that would be added at the wrong level, though.
Oliver Elphick
> It might in the future lead to some > hiccups; for example, if a new and necessary dependency were to be added > to kde, you would miss it. Arguably, that would be added at the wrong > level, though.
Yes I think it would - each package should describe what packages it depends as a Depends: and failure to do so is imho a bug.
Most dependency-bugs I encounter in sid are in the KDE packages.
Jon Dowland
> > Anybody here is as obsessed as I am for a clean system? > > No. Drives are cheap, but my time is not. I have a ridiculous number of > packages installed (because Debian makes it cheap to experiment and I don't > get too worked up about removing the ones I don't use often), and the total > size of my system (excluding /home, but including /usr/src and all of the > kernel tarballs extracted in there) is 5.2 GB. > > [...] > > I used to be obsessed with clean drives before I upgraded the 120MB Connor > in my Amiga. Since then, I haven't spent much time worrying about it.
But keeping it clean primarily saves time. Nobody cares about disk space. Why download upgrades to all those packages you never need? Why fight broken upgrades on things?
Unless you run stable, I guess, and don't upgrade much.
> ... >>I used to be obsessed with clean drives before I upgraded the 120MB Connor >>in my Amiga. Since then, I haven't spent much time worrying about it. > > But keeping it clean primarily saves time. Nobody cares about disk > space. Why download upgrades to all those packages you never need? > Why fight broken upgrades on things?
It's also about minimising the number of security bugs that actually affect you.
I used to work on HP-UX servers, and i routinely deleted the audio subsystem on them because they didn't have audio hardware. Everyone thought i was crazy, until one day a trivially exploitable security bug was announced. Then i got to thumb my nose at all the people who thought i was being anal, and i saved our team a lot of time in security patching.
Paul
If you have apache2 installed, and php4 wants to use apache1 stuff (which to me is perfectly reasonable, given that apache2 is rather recent), then use equivs to "trick" the system into thinking you actually _do_ have apache1 installed. Equivs just provides dummy packages to fufill dependencies. You can read up on it, from the 'equivs' package, oddly enough.
Thomas Adam
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