[maintenance] Removing old beta packages

[Guest]

My environment initially started out as 11.04 and I've upgraded to every beta and final release since, all the way to 12.10. The system has loads of software packages that were considered during the beta stages but never made it to the final cut, such as Calligra. There are also packages that were shipped in final releases but have been dropped by the time 12.10 came around such as the predecessors to Telepathy.

Is there a way to identify all of these packages for removal?

[claydoh]

No, not really. You would have to dig in manually. Packages that are truly obsolete are prompted to be removed during an upgrade. There should not be a lot of things, size-wise, outside of the kernels installed. Using sudo apt-get autoremove sometimes will prompt to uninstall older kernel packages (and other unneeded packages), but you still may have some left from previous Kubuntu versions, and are safe to remove. The packaging system can't really determine what was installed by the user or was a dependency of a meta-package such as kubuntu-desktop, which has its list of deps changed during the development cycle. But unless someone has some wild outrageously cool and complex scripting foo, the added packages are a small price to pay for running a development release.

Do note that a vast majority of the packages installed during the dev cycle are likely replacement packages for existing ones (or new requirements for them), and may have different names due to how the upstream projects are doing things. Kubuntu itself has not made a huge number of additions or subtractions in the past few years, even in the development cycles; muon, telepathy, and the testing of Calligra are the main ones.

[james147]

The packaging system can't really determine what was installed by the user or was a dependency of a meta-package such as kubuntu-desktop, which has its list of deps changed during the development cycle.

This is not true, the package manager can tell the difference between a manually install package and a package installed as a dependency sudo apt-get autoremove uses this info to remove packages that where installed as a dependency but the package that depends on them is no longer installed. It cannot however tell the difference between a package installed by the user and a package installed by other means (but not part of a dependency) such as preinstalled packages.

[claydoh]

This is not true, the package manager can tell the difference between a manually install package and a package installed as a dependency sudo apt-get autoremove uses this info to remove packages that where installed as a dependency but the package that depends on them is no longer installed. It cannot however tell the difference between a package installed by the user and a package installed by other means (but not part of a dependency) such as preinstalled packages.

Oops, that was what I thought I was trying to say ops:

Apt does not know, in the end, whether I installed Calligra myself or that kubuntu-desktop pulled it in. If the dependency list in kubuntu-desktop changes, and Calligra is replaced as a dep of that meta-package, calligra will not be removed. This sort of occurrence should only be happening during the development cycle, and then only before feature freezes come into effect.

I wonder if using deborphan (or gtkorphan for a gui) with the right switches might help out here, to some extent. perhaps? By default it only looks for orphan library files, but seems to be able to do more.

[Guest]

Just tried GtkOrphan and it worked a treat! It found lots of packages to remove and took around five or six passes to process all of the orphans.