> On 16 May 2023, at 23:35, Ismael L. Donis Garcia <slibre@???> wrote:
>
> 
> I come from debian 5 with the base system without doing any clean installation.
>
> From there I updated to devuan1 and so on and I'm already in devuan5
>
> But now I wanted to remove some packages that I think I should not be using, for example from gcc I have the following versions installed
> gcc-4.8-base
> gcc-4.9-base
> gcc-6-base
> gcc-8-base
> gcc-9-base
> gcc-10-base
> gcc-11-base
> gcc-12-base
>
> I don't know if some of them can be eliminated without this causing me some problem.
>
> What would you recommend?
>
> --
> Ismael

If you’re just looking for packages that were dependencies and no longer needed, try using `deborphan`.

https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/deborphan/deborphan.1.en.html

Alternatively try `aptitude search ~o` to find packages not existing in any archive.

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s04s05.en.html

Either of those should tell you if the package is needed. If the package doesn’t exist in the current archive, it is probably left over from an earlier release and can be safely removed or purged.

Also `apt-get autoremove` with or without --purge can help to remove unwanted packages.

As always, check the command output before actively removing any packages to see if there are any wanted dependency packages that would be removed at the same time.

--
Tom