Haro de Grauw said the following on 12/30/2011 07:40 AM:
May I suggest if we could design a tool like that 'Purge' of Debian, for this purpose? I'm not familiar with Debian's 'purge'. Does it clear any config files (etc.) that are *specific to one package*, or does it do a system-wide purge of everything?
In the latter case: I imagine it should be easy enough to make a tool that: - gets a list of all installed packages - gets a file list for each package - merges all these lists together (make a 'master list') - eliminates all files on the system that are not on the master list - (optional: gets zypper to reinstall all packages)
As people have poitned out, there is a lot of stuff that such a strategy would remove that you want kept. A more sensible approach would be to use tools like * Padraig Brady's 'fslint' (Mind you, all that could be done with 'find', but that's another matter.) FSLint will clean more crud out of your system than the minor dot-file detrius that LinuxIsOne talks of. BTDT. The other problem is hanging dependencies. Yes, you removed a package, but you didn't remove the packages it depends on that nothing else depends on. You've left orphaned packages lying around! There's an option for Zypper to do that :-) RPM can also tell you the config files used by the installed packages. You can then figure out the detrius ones that belonged to removed packages. But have you purged /tmp and your various caches? All that being said, I think these are not very good ways to waste your time; you would be better of play PySol or KMines. -- The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. -- H.L. Mencken -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org