[arch-general] defunct packages spooking around

[Firmicus]

Eric Bélanger a écrit :
> 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.
>
>   
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? :)