Miles Fidelman wrote: > > > John Hasler wrote: > > > Victor writes: > > > > But *many* people do install productivity tools, office tools, games, > > > > developer environments separately after the install, and then regret > > > > it and wish to get rid of them cleanly. > > > What does > > > > > > apt remove --purge <unwanted package> ; apt autoremove > > > > > > not do that you want done? > > Unfortunately it does not know what packages are unwanted, nor > > do I (the user) to tell it. > > > > We are all familiar with the situation when after a long period of > > usage, a system becomes full of software which we once installed for > > some purpose and then abandoned or disused. A gentle hint on what is an > > <unwanted package> would be very much appreciated at such moments. > > > > Maybe the high-level package management software (aptitude?) is better > > at that? > > > Of course, in any serious server environment, one is likely to have lots of > software that was NOT installed through dpkg or apt - ranging from stuff > installed directly from tarballs, to local configurations & scripts.
For such systems, one usually has backups/snapshots/archives of some kind, and sometimes even documentation. > > As far as I can tell, the only way to get to a "pristine" system, is to > rebuild from scratch. Yes, probably, for the server cattle it's the right approach. I have a number of ansible playbooks and don't hesitate to terminate an EC2 instance or a bhyve virtual machine. But sometimes it's such a pity to kill a desktop system. I've just been thinking of Android which is Linux based but has a very clear distinction between the base system and user packages. You can easily remove all the package bloat from an Android device (unless a package is preinstalled and is thus a part of the "base system). OTOH, a real return to the "pristine state" (a factory reset) is in fact equivalent to reinstalling from scratch because you lose all data and personalizations. -- Victor Sudakov, VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN 2:5005/49@fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/
