[arch-general] defunct packages spooking around

[Firmicus]

Eric Bélanger a écrit :
> 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.
>
>   

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.