I too have been bitten by this in the past and do think what Daniel has given as an answer is okish (although there should be some sort of better way.) For my exchange see [0] . One of the things which I didn't know to figure out how to produce a listing of such packages using aptitude [1] which was shared by Daniel as well. As I have removed all the packages which were removed haven't been able to test out if dpkg -L works on such packages as well or not. George if you have some packages whose configuration files are still it would be nice if you could produce a listing of what you get. If you do get the location of those files then a user could attempt at least to know what they contain and perhaps judge (or not) whether it could be useful now or latter.
Another point to be kept at back of mind as well is over a period of time a package could merge other packages in it or be split in one or more packages, in the former the config files remaining the same (while binary is removed) while at the latter more config files would perhaps be added. I have a very vague sense of how aptitude does things so I might be right (or not). I do hope however that my $0.02 does prove to be useful to you otherwise simply disregard it. 0 - http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/aptitude-devel/2012-February/001945.html 1 - aptitude search ?config-files 2 - dpkg -L = -L|--listfiles <package> ... List files `owned' by package(s). A healthy package displays something like this , a random e.g. :- $ dpkg -L fonts-gubbi /. /etc /etc/fonts /etc/fonts/conf.avail /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-0-fonts-gubbi.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d /usr /usr/share /usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc/fonts-gubbi /usr/share/doc/fonts-gubbi/changelog.gz /usr/share/doc/fonts-gubbi/changelog.Debian.gz /usr/share/doc/fonts-gubbi/copyright /usr/share/fonts /usr/share/fonts/truetype /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Gubbi /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Gubbi/Gubbi.ttf /etc/fonts/conf.d/65-0-fonts-gubbi.conf Sorry for the noise :) -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com 065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
