Sebastien Marie <sema...@online.fr> wrote:

> semarie@ spoke about integrating some elements inside the installer when he 
> was 
> about "clean _other things_". It isn't about "stepping back". Even if the 
> installer would clean all it is possible to remove safely, I would still use 
> a 
> program to list libraries without registered packages using them.

There is nothing you can do in the installer to solve this problem of
deleting old libraries.  Old libraries MUST STAY, because sysclean does
not traverse and inspect all files in the entire filesystem to conclude
there are no use of them.

> I wrote sysclean because it solves *my* problems regarding maintaining a 
> system, 
> and I shared it because it could help *some* others people. It wasn't created 
> with intent to solve the general use case for all possibles users.

The pkg_info blob says:

    sysclean is a script designed to help remove obsolete files between OpenBSD
    upgrades.

But sysclean can help people remove non-obsolete files.  

    sysclean does not remove any files on the system. It only reports obsolete
    filenames or packages using out-of-date libraries.

The sysclean report includes files without doing a comprehensive search to
validate that they are NOT IN USE.  They are not obsolute, yet they show up
in the list.

> You don't like it, fine. Just don't use it.

This conversation is happening because sysclean makes it too easy for
people who don't understand the complete system sufficiently, to then
use rm, and break their system.

You can make that claim of "Don't use it" against me all day long, but
people will keep discovering sysclean and potentially using it to break
their systems.

I have also pointed out a couple of times now that sysclean ignores the
lessons of "find -print0" and "xargs -0", and I worry it could find a
file called

"/somewhere/matchingpattern/\n/etc/spwd.db"

Pehraps it won't match such patterns?  I suspec it will.

And then someone will rm -f `sysclean`.


I think sysclean is below the normal standard for our group.


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