[arch-general] defunct packages spooking around

[Eric Bélanger]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Firmicus <Firmicus at gmx.net> wrote:
> 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.
>

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

>
>