Greetings everyone. As we all know apt-get does a very good job, by identifying which packages were installed automatically as dependencies and aren't needed anymore. Wile this is very nice, I still fear that, from time to time, there are manually installed packages gathering on my computer which I don't use but don't remove because I don't even know I once installed them. Another problem like this is that build-depends aren't removed either, because they are marked as manually installed.
I thought a little while about this problem and came up with the idea, that every manually installed package whose files were not accessed for more than a specified time (a month, a year, whatever) could be considered unneeded. So I started writing a script that identifies just those packages that are probably not needed anymore. As it seems it works as expected. This approach also brings some problems. For example some packages that have files which belong to a frequently scanned database aren't detected because they are accessed by the scan. Also I'm not really sure if this is even a good idea, or if there is maybe another program already present which does already identify unused, manually installed packages and I just didn't find it. But if this approach is maybe a good idea. Would it be worth to consider packaging it? If so, I would be able to maintain it, even though I would need a sponsor. What are your thoughts on this approach to take the system clean? Regards Sven Bartscher
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