Debian Package a Day ([info]debaday) wrote,
@ 2004-06-14 08:00:00
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deborphan - Find orphaned libraries
deborphan finds "orphaned" packages on your system. It determines which packages have no other packages depending on their installation, and shows you a list of these packages. It is most useful when finding libraries, but it can be used on packages in all sections.

If you've had a Debian box running for a while that's had a lot of packages installed and removed, deborphan is a handy tool for finding some of the cruft1 that's accumulated on your system. It's especially handy at giving you a list of libraries that are no longer required (assuming packages have the appropriate dependencies documented).

More information on this package can be found on the Debian web site.
(If there is a package you would like to see featured here, go to the userinfo page and follow the directions there to submit your entry.)

1Yes, cruft. Would anyone care to write up a short comparison of the two to help folks choose which one is right for their needs.

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[info]andrel
2004-06-14 09:05 am UTC (link)
Cruft appears to have been abandoned by the author. My experience has been it doesn't work very well.

The interesting comparisons are "deborphan vs debfoster" or "deborphan vs aptitude", but since I don't use debfoster or aptitude I'm not qualified to do that.

(Reply to this)
deborphan needs no priming
(Anonymous)
2004-06-14 02:16 pm UTC (link)
with aptitude and debfoster, you have to do work on the front end to get it to work. whenever you install an application, aptitude and (it appears) debfoster record what package you explicitly requested, and what got installed incidently (to fulfill a dependency). with this history, when you uninstall the requested package, the dependencies are also uninstalled.

i choose deborphan because i didn't want to have to deal with missing histories (for packages i had already installed) and i didn't want to be limited to using the application's interface (aptitude can only track packages that you installed with aptitude, not dselect or dpkg).

i have a python script in a daily cron job that runs deborphan, calculates the true total size of each "orphaned" package (not what's stored in the package's metainfo), and dumps some other package info (section, priority, short description) into a csv file. every now and then i audit the orphans from the csv file and diff the csv file against a previous version to see what has changed.

(Reply to this)

(Anonymous)
2004-06-15 11:29 am UTC (link)
I just tried both cruft and deborphan. Cruft just dumped a long list of files that it thinks shouldn't be there - files that are not tracked by dpkg - which is pretty useless. Deborphan was quite useful. I mamaged to get rid of some old libs and perl modules (--guess-perl/python/etc is very nice).

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Uses for cruft package
(Anonymous)
2004-06-21 11:28 pm UTC (link)

Files not tracked by dpkg and not in places like /home and /usr/local have the following problems:

  • The files can be found and used instead of the dpkg-installed files.
  • Can be things installed by a root kit
  • You may give /home, /usr/local, /etc directories more care when repartitioning, backing up, etc. than the partitions where most cruft-listed files are.
  • They take up disk space, possibly redundantly mirrorring existing .debs.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
want deborphan as a tree
(Anonymous)
2004-06-16 04:29 am UTC (link)
I've been using deborphan for years, first pass each time is just 
    while [ -n "`deborphan`" ]; do
    deborphan; echo; dpkg --purge `deborphan`
done
until I get nothing, second pass is
    deborphan -a|sort|more
with manual selection. If I'm really feeling energetic I add "-n".

But what I really find time consuming, is once you've pruned off some packages, deborphan uncovers more. Sometimes I've had to go through the manual process about five times before I run out of things to prune.

I wish for a tool that would show me what is immediately under the package I'm about to prune, so that I can prune that too, ad nausium. Like pruning a fruit tree, it's best to cut near the branching points ... but I'm not able to see the branching points, I can only see the tips of the branches.

If you have such a tool, please let me know. qz at hp dot com.

(Reply to this)
BTW orphan in wajig
(Anonymous)
2004-06-17 05:34 am UTC (link)
There is an orphan cammand in wajig

(Reply to this)

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