Arch Linux

Jacek Poplawski

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2006-01-10

Posts: 736

Website

find and remove unused things

Hello

I am not sure is it good forum for such idea, but is the best I found...

When I first read about Arch I've noticed "Things that are relatively unused are not kept", I have idea to go further...

Is it possible to find unused things not theoretically, but in the real system, in my system and delete unused packages or rebuild these packages to remove unused files?

With "find" command one can files which were not accessed for long time (for example 2 months). This is not always true (for instance kernel is probably not accessed at all).

Pacman can find related packages.

Now there are three possibilites:

- all files from package X were unused - probably this package can be safely removed
- some files from package X were unused - probably they could be removed from this package, or moved into another package
- files which are not from any package were unused - maybe we could erase them or backup for later use?

Let's go further in the dream... Imagine that person who found unused files in his/her system can send report to community, some server can make statistics and people who are making packages can see which part of packages are unused - and modify them!

What do you think and why this is wrong?