Hi,
Just a summary of what we just discussed on IRC in #grml:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:48:56PM +0100, Axel Beckert wrote:
gcc-4.7-base and libprocps0 can be removed without harm, they're no more needed. (procps depends on libprocps3 nowadays and there's no gcc-4.7 left on the system.)
They seem to be brought in via depends/suggests/... since there's no explicit dependency on it in grml-live, needs investigation.
We now suspect it comes from the base tar ball which is used to bootstrap the build. gcc-*-base packages are of priority required and hence never get removed automatically even if they is marked as automatically installed via a dependency.
debconf-i18n (> 1 MB) can probably removed, too.
Same here
If you install recommends by default, this looks obvious to me: debconf recommends debconf-i18n.
But grml doesn't do that. Until a few years ago, debconf had a hard dependency on debconf-i18n which later got downgraded to Recommends (IIRC when the previous alternative dependency debconf-english got merged back into debconf). So this likely also comes from the base tar-ball.
mika plans rebuild the base tar ball later today, so we should get rid of these packages soon.
Does grml really need tasksel and tasksel-data? (> 1,2 MB together)
Nope, wondering which packages brings that in... thanks
I suspect the base tar ball for that one, too. There's some tight relationship with d-i and aptitude, but I forgot the details. (At some time in the past tasksel needed aptitude, at least for some features used by d-i.)
The following transitional packages can be safely removed:
- libblas3gf
Seems to be pulled in via a package
IIRC libblas3gf and libblas3 are often used in alternative dependencies.
If in the past there was one dependency which only depended on libblas3gf and it made it's way in the base tar ball that way, the issue should be probably also solved by rebuilding the base tar ball.
Since mika asked how I found that stuff: I used the same aptitude search patterns I used for finding disk space eating cruft on my EeePC 701 with only 4 GB of disk space. You get quite good in doing so after a while. ;-)
Here are a few of these recipes, mostly from https://github.com/xtaran/zshrc/blob/master/zsh.d/50-alias#L201 and http://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Debian/CoolTools/Finding%20packages%2...
Show packages which are not marked as automatically installed and don't have any reverse dependencies:
aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=~i !~M !?reverse-depends(~i)"
Find installed packages with "dummy" or "transition" in their description:
aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=~i ( ~d transition | ~d dummy )"
The used search terms also can be used with "aptitude search" on the commandline if someone prefers the CLI interface over the TUI interface (which I use primarily).
Plus remembering which packages I removed on quite some of my boxes. :-)
Kind regards, Axel