[Grml-devel] First Release Candidate of Grml version 2014.03 released

[Axel Beckert]

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%20for%20deinstallation%20on%20the%20commandline%20with%20aptitude.futile

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
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