On Tue, Feb 4, 2025 at 8:47 AM Andrew M.A. Cater <amaca...@einval.com> wrote: > Mentioning dselect - that will give you all the obsolete packages it > can't find - usually at the top of the interface but it does need > some degree of expertise to unravel what it shows. > > (I just used dselect to find obscure packages I'd long since thought > that I'd purged).
That's pretty much why I used dselect all the time. These days I maintain a set of personal meta-packages that lists all the software I know I want installed and about once a quarter I do something like "apt-mark showmanual | grep -v mrc-$(hostname) | xargs apt-mark auto" followed by "apt autopurge". (A few more steps in there like checking for transitional packages I can now remove and see if I am going to remove any packages I installed adhoc and decide I now want to keep.) mrc
