further package removals/potential package removals

[Jamie Zawinski]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 
> On a tangent to this...  whats the easiest way to get a feel of which
> packages I'm not using on my fedora install?  Is there anytihng more
> clever than doing an exhaustive check of atimes on all the files owned
> by rpm packages and comparing that to the package install time?

After I do a fresh install, I usually just go through the "rpm -qa"
list and start trying "rpm -e" on stuff that I believe I don't use,
and see when I get a dependency on something that I know I *do* use.

Which is distressingly often.  There is just an amazing amount of
dependency clutter in there.

For example: I don't use Windows, ever.  This means I don't use Samba.
But I can't uninstall it, because Nautilus depends on it.  Now, I don't
use Nautilus either, but I can't just uninstall *that*, because
control-center depends on it, which I *do* use.

Likewise, I don't own a printer and haven't in years, but I often find
myself unable to delete the zillions of printer drivers without also
deleting Ghostscript and half of Gnome or something.

If space is tight, the first thing I do is nuke everything except en_US
under /usr/share/locale/ and /usr/lib/locale/ -- since I don't happen to
speak 113 different languages, that's more than 320MB of pure waste.

Blowing away /usr/share/doc/ is also helpful; it's huge, and every file
in there is Googlable.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski      jwz at jwz.org                  http://www.jwz.org/
                    jwz at dnalounge.com      http://www.dnalounge.com/
                                         http://jwz.livejournal.com/