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angstrem

Member

Registered: 2013-12-02

Posts: 7

Manage installed packages conveniently

With time, lots of packages end up installed on my machine, and I'm pretty sure that a good share of them are not used at all and just occupy free space. However, it seems you can't track these packages using pacman conveniently. I would like to have a GUI app with package categorization, filtering and other useful features. Is there such an util which can help me to do the clean-up?

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

However, it seems you can't track these packages using pacman conveniently.

That depends on your definition of "convenience"... I would argue that pacman (and the tools built around it like paccache and expac) give you full control of your package cache.

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ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

There are GUIs for pacman

However there are also ways to clean up unnecessary packages using only pacman:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=690438
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=115796
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57431

Proinsias

Member

From: Glasgow

Registered: 2013-08-19

Posts: 121

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

If found bigpkg in the AUR helpful when clearing out https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/bigpkg

ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

With time, lots of packages end up installed on my machine, and I'm pretty sure that a good share of them are not used at all and just occupy free space. However, it seems you can't track these packages using pacman conveniently.

This is really ambiguous. If you've never cleaned the package cache (/var/cahce/pacman/pkg), then you can probably consider most of what's in there wasted space.  pacman itself has a means of cleaning out the cache, and the paccache command offers finer control over what you keep and remove from the cache. If, however, you mean that you have a very bad habit of installing stuff and never using it, then stop doing that.  If you have a lot of garbage collecting on your system, the let the tedium of going through package descriptions and leftover .pacsave files be a negative incentive for you to be more careful in the future.

If found bigpkg in the AUR helpful when clearing out https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/bigpkg

I'm not familiar with all of bigpkg's features, but pacsysclean comes with the pacman package and will list all installed packages by the amount of space occupied, in descending order.  Or ascending order, depending on how you think about it. It prints them starting with the package that takes the least space, but unless you pipe the output to a pager you'll start at the bottom of the list with the bigest package and scroll up to read it all, so...

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,722

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

You man also want to comb through the pacman manual to decode pacman -Qdt

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Proinsias

Member

From: Glasgow

Registered: 2013-08-19

Posts: 121

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Cheers, I've never used pacsysclean. Comparing the output of both, aside from inversion, bigpkg give sizes that are, well, bigger. My biggest package, from bigpkg, is digikam at 261.35MB but pacsysclean reports it as 55.22MB.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Are you sure you understand how bigpkg works wrt the displayed package size?

Proinsias

Member

From: Glasgow

Registered: 2013-08-19

Posts: 121

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Are you sure you understand how bigpkg works wrt the displayed package size?

No.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,734

Website

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Another tool:

pacgraph -c

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ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Are you sure you understand how bigpkg works wrt the displayed package size?

No.

Very pithy.   I looked at the forum thread linked to in the bigpkg AUR page, and it seems bigpkg shows of individual packages + dependencies, while pacsysclean just shows individual packages. On the other hand, pacsysclean accepts flags listed by "pacman -Qh."

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Proinsias

Member

From: Glasgow

Registered: 2013-08-19

Posts: 121

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Thanks. I suspected dependencies but my plan to add up package+dependency sizes and compare results never came to fruition.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Manage installed packages conveniently

Thanks. I suspected dependencies but my plan to add up package+dependency sizes and compare results never came to fruition.

/usr/bin/bigpkg is a python script, you can read it to see how it works.