Hi all,

running `aptitude search ~o` shows hundreds of obsolete packages. There were
none before the upgrade. Well, one may say it's not so many, compared to the
thousands of `dpkg --get-selections`. However, what to do about them?
Certainly, some of them are to be purged, but which ones? Only a minority are
tagged as automatically installed (A), and that's not a criterion for choosing
what to purge, since they may be needed by some "obsolete" package that still
works...

BTW, the upgrade triggered some nasty problems. Some server programs stopped
working. Both upgradable daemons and manually compiled ones at a certain stage
during the dist-upgrade were unable to connect. netstat showed them listening,
tcpdump showed sync packets coming in, but strace on the processes showed idle
waiting. Even after reboot, manually installed stuff had to be recompiled in
order to work. So, I'm a bit scared about how obsolete packages can behave.

Anyway, to look at each package one by one sounds daunting. Any ideas to slim
down the list?

The last time I renamed a command, I installed a wrapper script to log each
call. Then, after some time, check if the old command is still used. Doing so
automatically for each executable might be possible, albeit sinister. But how
could one track libraries usage?


TIA
Ale
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