'ellow, I've recently subscribed to this list as I wanted to let you all know about a helpful little utility that a friend of mine and I have written.
It is a Perl script that works out which packages on your system are not being used and can be safely removed. This puts an end to the disk creep experienced by an often dist-upgraded Debian box. The script works out which packages you have installed that no other packages depend on. It then takes this list of packages and finds the ones whose names begin with ``lib''. These are the packages that are most likely to be taking up space un-necessarily and the user is recommended to remove them. Apt is used to do the actual removals. The use of the --purge option is recommended. The script also generates a list of the non `libXXX'' packages you have installed on your system, but mentions that you may really want to keep some of them. Because it depends on the information provided by the package maintainers, it is guaranteed to work for you (as long as your packages have been properly constructed, which is highly likely!) It did find a problem on my system -- bittorent didn't depend on libwxgtk2.4 so that was un-installed. It was easy to fix, however and I believe the problem is sorted out now. (If you're a developer who has lots of ``-dev'' packages installed, they may be targeted for removal. However, we assume you'd know you needed them when you saw the list so you wouldn't choose to remove them.) So, this tool can be useful for users and package maintainers. I hope you find it useful. You can download it (as well as a few other useful scripts) from: http://scriptopia.agrip.org.uk/ Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for improvement. Enjoy! bye just now, -- Matthew T. Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]