Re: [arch-general] defunct packages spooking around

Eric Bélanger a écrit :

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Firmicus wrote:

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Eric Bélanger a écrit :

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On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Firmicus wrote:

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Allan McRae a écrit :

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Firmicus wrote:

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Hi folks,

Sorry for the halloweenish subject heading ;)

I recently got this bug report: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16690

It turned out it was not a bug with the perl package at all, but a problem which occurs when the presumably very old and no longer existing package "termcap-compat" is installed on a system. It was originally installed as a dependency for some other, unidentified package. And it turned out to my surprise that even I still had that package installed!

That prompts me to ask the following:

Are there other such obsolete packages that typically should no longer be installed on a "clean" Arch Linux system? I am not in favour of automating their removal, of course, but it would be useful to collect a list of such things that we could put in the wiki and/or our monthly newsletter. Another example that comes to mind is the obsolete file /etc/udev/udev.rules that I also still had until recently, and which I have removed after Thomas' suggestion.

Please submit your suggestions for the forthcoming "Arch Ghostbusting Day" (aka "The Great Halloween Cleanup")! :)

libdownload - replaced by libfetch as pacman download backend csup - relaced by using rsync for abs

I removed these long ago, but...

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Although, all these should be detectable by "pacman -Qqtd" (maybe not libdownload as it was part of base).

the above gave me quite a substantial list! Probably I should run this more often. Most of what is listed by pacman -Qqtd can indeed be safely removed. But sometimes the output can be surprising: I've got nautilus in there, which clearly is not something I would want to remove from my Gnome desktop :) Well, this is the kind of mess that one can expect on a system that has been installed nearly four years ago!

F

Try with "pacman -Qm". That might work better if you don't have a lot of custom/AUR packages installed.

Hem, I have hundreds of them! But they're almost exclusively auto-generated packages for CPAN/perl stuff. In my case running pacman -Qqm | grep -v perl does the job, which does not, however, reveal any new item to be cleaned away.

I am actually hunting for packages that used to be in core or extra and no longer exist, not even in community/AUR, but might still be polluting some Arch installations... Perhaps termcap-compat was an exceptional case after all.

check http://www.archlinux.de/?page=PackageStatistics especially the packages in the unknown category. Some of the removed packages are listed there.

That's what I guessed: termcap-compat has ~18%! csup: 15% and libdownload: 59%!! For the rest one would need to check each pkg under "unknown" for non-existence in AUR... Any volunteer? :)