[arch-general] defunct packages spooking around

[Eric Bélanger]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Firmicus <Firmicus at gmx.net> wrote:
> Allan McRae a écrit :
>> Firmicus wrote:
>>> 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...
>
>> 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.