Antoine Beaupre wrote: > The release notes, in sections 4.2.2 and 4.8, actually suggest *three* > *different* ways of finding what are essential orphaned packages:
I don't think you mean "orphan" in either of the senses known to "https://wiki.debian.org/Glossary#orphan";. > aptitude search '~o' This is nice and simple, but frankly as an aptitude user I wouldn't bother. Instead I'd do what the text just above mentions - launch aptitude, notice that there was a category for "Obsolete and Locally Created Packages" (which would tell me I'd somehow lost track of my kernel packages), and purge everything in that category from the full-screen interface, without going back to the commandline. > aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))' This one (apparently an improvement on the '~i(!~ODebian)' search that was recommended for buster, though the logic is too subtle for me to remember) is looking for a slightly different thing at a different stage in the upgrade process: it's part of the section about getting rid of "non-Debian packages" *before* the upgrade. The '~o' and '!~ODebian' searches find different kinds of "unwanted" package. > apt-forktracer | sort I've never quite been able to understand how it is that anybody could get themselves into the situation of *needing* this specialised package installed to work around the weirdness of their setup, but still need to be told what it is that's unusual about their system. > Then I also know of those: > > apt-show-versions | grep -v /bullseye This is another package I've never needed to install on my stable desktop precisely because it's my stable desktop. If I had a reason to install it, presumably I'd already know about the reason, and step one in the bullseye upgrade process should be to get rid of that. > aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))' Yes, that's the one you listed above. > aptitude search > '?narrow(?not(?archive("^[^n][^o][^w].*$")),?version(CURRENT))' Does that do something similar to the above, but less intelligibly, or something different? > I frankly don't quite know where I stand with all this anymore, but I > am getting the strong feeling we're sending an incoherent message > here. :) It's two different messages in two different parts of the release notes. The first message is roughly "before the upgrade, look at what you've got installed. If it's a mix of complex pins and PPA packages and nonsense like that, start by getting rid of all the crazy stuff". Unfortunately, this relies on the reader to apply some common sense, so we've fallen into the trap of replacing "subjective" advice with "objective" diagnostic commandlines. The second message is "after the upgrade, throw out all the stuff that isn't supported any longer". This really is trivially easy to automate, as long as you don't confuse it with the previous task. > In my personal documentation, I've settled on `apt-forktracer`, I'd be interested to know what you find it useful for. > but I > suspect we might want to stick with `aptitude search '~obsolete'` > because that matches other documentation in the release notes (and > allows for easy purging). But it isn't looking for the same thing. > Is there any reason why we have all that diversity? > > What's the right way to do what we actually want here? [---suture---] > I actually forgot that bullseye itself introduces yet another one: > > apt list ~obsolete And indeed for section 4.8, which is dealing with tidying up *after* the upgrade, it might make sense to recommend the use of apt instead of aptitude here. > Apparently, those are also a thing: > > comm -23 <(dpkg-query -W -f '${db:Status-Abbrev}\t${Package}\n' | grep > '^.[^nc]' | cut -f2 | sort) <(apt-cache dumpavail | sed -rn 's/^Package: > (.*)/\1/p' | sort -u) > apt list --installed | awk -F/ '/\[installed,local\]/{print $1}' If they're not getting shorter, you're going the wrong way. -- JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
