Hi *,
Yesterday I was trying to reclaim some wasted space from my HDD by
removing stuff from the documentation, among others, that I'd never need -
some 10MB of HOWTOs, all copyright and changelog files. Another huge package
was gtk-themes as well as sawfish-themes from the Helix GNOME.
After some hour or so of deleting stuff I thought to myself that deleting
all those files doesn't make sense, because at the next system upgrade many
of them will come back as the packages they came in would be upgraded. The
mentioned gtk-themes package contains over 40MB of themes, half of which I
don't like at all and they would definitely simply litter my HDD wasting the
space.
The idea is to enable the local administrator to create and maintain a
database of files from packages that s/he doesn't ever want on their system.
I imagine that dpkg would have to be augmented with a capability to use a
hold flag on files that the admin banned from the system. The actual
selection of files would be really easy - the admin deletes all the unwanted
files, then runs some utility to investigate what files are missing from all
the packages and record those in some database (/var/lib/dpkg/held-files??).
Sure, there would be situations where one or antoher file deleted by
accident would get into that database, but nothing's perfect. The admin
would have the ability to scan only a specific package for deleted files, of
course.
Well, it's just an idea, but I think it would save us some space on our
disks and some time for those of us who don't like cluttered disks as well
as repetitive tasks :))
regards,
marek
p.s. if such capability exists already, just tell me where and I'm sorry for
not doing my homework :)
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