Some of you may know that I am an Ubuntu fanatic. Why? It just works. I have used Linux since around 1994 and I used Slackware at the time… which involved downloading a bazillion 1.44MB floppies images then using rawrite to write the to blank floppies… boy was that a drag. Down through the “ages”, I went from some distro’s that I can’t even remember the name of, then Redhat, then Mandrake, and the list goes on. Redhat based distro’s I very much dislike because of “RPM Hell” (and if you do not know what that means, then you haven’t used the distro long enough yet). However, yum has helped a great deal in that area.
Anyway... I am way off subject. I have been using aptitude for quite some time as a replacement for apt-get. The reason being is that it keeps track of dependencies and deleting packages that were once installed as dependencies but are no longer required.
I have learned through “my sources” since Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) there is a new function that allows you to remove unused dependencies when removing your application.
[server][user][~]$ sudo apt-get autoremove myapp
That should remove all dependencies that were installed with the application but are no longer dependencies of any other application. I haven’t experimented with this yet, but it sure looks good on the surface.
Pretty spiffy stuff these debian folk come up with.