Op vrijdag 06 januari 2012 13:02:26 schreef Thierry Vignaud: > On 6 January 2012 12:27, Wolfgang Bornath <molc...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > This is a well known issue. > > To clear out the list you need a deep knowledge of the system to > > determine which packages are really not needed anymore. > > > > Lately this --auto-orphans line shreddered my whole system on a fresh > > install after the first update, several system services could not > > start at next reboot, applications did not run, etc. One of the very > > few times I had to re-install because of a bug. Call me newbie or > > pussy but until this is not a secure function I will never touch it > > again. > > This is just a bogus claim: > If some apps break after removing orphan packages, they'll break too > after manually removing such packages, meaning they lack some > requires...
perhaps, to instill more confidence, we could: - have only list the leaf orphans; which means of course, you can do it multiple times, or maybe --recursive to give them all - not to list in orphan list packages which don't contain any files: ie, tasks - mention clearly that if they want to use some package, that they can install it - list separately and sorted the ones with changed access times? as in, they have been used since install? (unless partition is mounted noatime, of course... /o\ personally, orphans can break packages, but basesystem and basesystem-minimal should both not be removed, perhaps we can even put on a warning if those are not installed; when running --auto-orphans. perhaps a combination of these options could instill more confidence... but... is it worth it???