remove lose-deps

pressh · 2005-11-20 22:08:48

Lately my arch partition begins to slow down a bit. I think this is mainly due to lose deps. I read the manual of pacman, but can't figure out how to get lose of them. what I'm searching for is mainly a command equal to 'emerge --depclean' (for those who know gentoo).
Thanks in advance (you know, I really want my arch partition to be faster as my gentoo partition)

LB06 · 2005-11-20 22:59:24

Well I'm not sure if there's anything you can do right now. I always remove packages with the pacman -Rs[c] switch, which will make sure there will be no deps hanging around doing nothing.

Btw, unless your FS is getting really full, I doubt loose deps can slow down the system, as none of them will be loaded into memory anyway.

Dusty · 2005-11-20 23:07:31

I periodically look at the output of pacman -Qe and remove any packages that I don't want explicitly installed from there. That may be enough?

pacman -Qe outputs all packages that don't have anything depending on them. This includes loose dependencies, as well as main applications you use every day.

remember to clean your cache (pacman -Sc) periodically as well.

Dusty

pressh · 2005-11-21 09:40:57

LB06 wrote:

Btw, unless your FS is getting really full, I doubt loose deps can slow down the system, as none of them will be loaded into memory anyway.

My Arch root partition is 5GB, 60% used. So don't think that is much of a problem. I can do a little repartitioning and get it up to about 8 or 10 GB, if you think that will give me even more speed increase?

Dusty wrote:

I periodically look at the output of pacman -Qe and remove any packages that I don't want explicitly installed from there. That may be enough?

I removed about 30 packages, but I sure missed some as I did not know what they do (yes I can search for that, but don't want to). Am I correct that a lib will not show up if it only depends on another lib? What I basically need is that all libs are removed which in the end are not needed by an installed application.

It would be nice to have a command in the future equal to 'pacman --depclean'. Don't think this would be difficult to include this in pacman.

Any other suggestions, or am I stuck in reinstalling Arch, if I want to clean up a bit (next time I should use the '-Rs' switch in pacman :oops: ) ?

LB06 · 2005-11-21 15:50:30

pressh wrote:

LB06 wrote:
Btw, unless your FS is getting really full, I doubt loose deps can slow down the system, as none of them will be loaded into memory anyway.
My Arch root partition is 5GB, 60% used. So don't think that is much of a problem. I can do a little repartitioning and get it up to about 8 or 10 GB, if you think that will give me even more speed increase?

As I said, loose deps won't slow down your system, given the ceteris paribus condition of course and that your used partition space is well below 90%. This also goes for removing deps: it won't speed things up, unless your free HD space was REALLY low.

phrakture · 2005-11-21 16:24:15

Just a note - I hacked this crappy thing together for someone.... it's similar to pacman -Qe, although pacman -Qe only lists packages that were explicitly installed (which is 90% of the time).

Basically it will produce the same output as pacman -Qe (though alot slower), except for the packages labeled "implicitly installed"

bogomipz · 2005-11-26 13:13:35

I agree that the pacman feature pressh requests would be nice. The logic for finding the packages to remove is right there in phrakture's script, but the search should be optimized alot (which would be the case if somebody implemented it properly inside pacman). The 'Reason' tag should be checked for installed as dependency, not explicitly installed, because packages installed before a certain version of pacman don't have the tag set in the db. Pacman would of course ask for confirmation before uninstalling anything.

Oh, and it would be nice to be able to change the reason tag on a package: Let's say some media player got installed as a dep for a front-end, then you removed the front-end because you didn't like it and used the player from CLI directly. Now, pacman will consider this media player a dependency that no package depends on. Of course, as long as the pacman db remains an easy to edit text format, the few times you want to fix this kind of situation it's probably ok to do it by hand.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-11-20 22:08:48

remove lose-deps

#2 2005-11-20 22:59:24

Re: remove lose-deps

#3 2005-11-20 23:07:31

Re: remove lose-deps

#4 2005-11-21 09:40:57

Re: remove lose-deps

#5 2005-11-21 15:50:30

Re: remove lose-deps

#6 2005-11-21 16:24:15

Re: remove lose-deps

#7 2005-11-26 13:13:35

Re: remove lose-deps

Board footer