So I’ve been playing with openSUSE quite a bit in a virtual box image, and I had asked on a different post regarding upgrading and package clean up and thought I’d ask a bit more directed question this time.
Those of you that perform upgrades, how do you manage package bloat and cleanup? Do you just not bother, or are there any tools that you use for this purpose? How do you clean up rpms that are obsolete after upgrading from release x to release y? How about removing dependencies? Say, package xyz requires package abc. If you remove xyz, what tools do you use to find and remove package abc?
I’m a former gentoo user and I’ve never “reinstalled” my Gentoo system. I started in 2004 and up until about a month ago, I was using the same install. Gentoo has commands for finding packages that are no longer in the portage tree and also commands (depclean) for removing unused dependencies. I run ubuntu on my laptop and it has similar abilities; autoremoveable packages for cleaning up unused dependencies, and obsolete packages for packages that do not have a repository “home”. In the case of obsoletes, some may be packages I install, but I have no problem managing that manually.
What are openSUSE’s options in scenarios like this? Do people expect to run the same SUSE install for years and years? FYI, the gentoo system may be the same install, but I’ve gone through many many hardware upgrades. Nice thing about gentoo, rsync clone, re-build a few things in a chroot environment from a boot CD, and blammo, all done.
Is this something that I can expect out of openSUSE at this point?
I’ve looked at rpmorphan a little and it just does dependencies.
However, it doesn’t do anything as far as determining if a package is no longer provided with a repository or distribution.
rpm also doesn’t seem to have that capability. As far as I know, both rpm and rpmorphan are basically unaware of what the repository is, as all they handle are the packages themselves.
So then use smart. Smart has a command called query. This command has 26 options. You can even change the ouput format to say dotty or graphviz for example. Between rpmorphan and smart, you’ll nail it down.
I’ve taken a look at smart, and either I’m not smart enough, or something is missing. What query command via smart will tell me what packages are no longer referenced by a repository?
I’ve not yet seen how to do that.
Let me re-ask my original question, how do you deal with package bloat over the years? Do you install from scratch instead of upgrade? Do you use smart combined with rpmorphan? If so, can you provide specific details?
wangmaster wrote:
> I’ve taken a look at smart, and either I’m not smart enough, or
> something is missing. What query command via smart will tell me what
> packages are no longer referenced by a repository?
>
> I’ve not yet seen how to do that.
>
> Let me re-ask my original question, how do you deal with package bloat
> over the years? Do you install from scratch instead of upgrade? Do you
> use smart combined with rpmorphan? If so, can you provide specific
> details?
I never upgrade. I have /home mounted on a separate partition from / which
preserves most of my personal my files. I then make a tar copy of /etc and save
that on /home. That way I can recover all my changes to boot.local, etc. With
the new system in place, I can configure relatively quickly.
One other thing - I use partition image to backup all my partitions. That way, I
can restore the old system if anything goes horribly wring.