[Popcon-developers] Bug#414865: popularity-contest: A script to filter requested/recommended/suggested packages

[Bill Allombert]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 04:04:16PM +0200, Christophe Lohr wrote:
> Package: popularity-contest
> Severity: normal
> 
> Hi,
> 
> popularity-contest can have several usage. For example,
>    popularity-contest | grep '<OLD>'
> will show me a list of packages I have not been used for more than three
> months.  Then, "popcon-largest-unused" sorts unused packets by size.    
> However, this output isn't totally accurate: some packages appear "old" but
> I can't remove them because other (non-old) packages depend on them.  Also, 
> some packages recommended or suggested by other are likely to be used in the
> future.
> 
> Therefore, I propose the following simple shell script (named
> "popcon-nodependency"): it filters the output of "popcon-largest-unused" to
> display only packets that are not requested/recommended/suggested by other.

Hello Christophe,

I am afraid your script does not work accurately:
1) you do not remove dependencies from package that are not installed
but still in dpkg database (not in 'ok installed' state).
2) you do not remove dependency from other OLD packages recursively.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.