[Tfug] apt-get undo

[Claude Rubinson]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 10:43:44AM -0700, Glen Pfeiffer wrote:
> To help your current situation there is deborphan. It can help
> remove unused packages, though I've never used it.

deborphan works pretty well.  Make sure to look at the man page,
though.  By default, deborphan only searches for unused libraries.
Also, you'll want to run it multiple times because as you remove one
package that can make other packages become orphaned.  I generally run
it something along the lines of:
	$ aptitude purge $(deborphan)
and then arrow up to keep rerunning it.
 
(You might have to massage the output of deborphan with sed or
something, I don't recall offhand.)

> > > Aptitude has been Debian's recommended package manager for
> > > a few years now and it's worth switching to.
> 
> Is that still true for 'testing'? If one's only reason for 
> switching to aptitude is for the ability to remove automatically 
> installed dependencies, does apt-get in testing do a good enough 
> job? I was under the impression that it was; and was planning on 
> switching back to apt-get in testing.

Don't know.  I was surprised to here that serious development was
continuing on apt-get since I though that all the momentum was being
directed toward aptitude (I believe, for example, that they're working
on coming up with a true GUI frontend for aptitude).

Claude