Longtime Manjaro users: do you check for orphans?

Support
22

Keep in mind that the overlay packages section may show packages that were removed in favor of the synced package. In your list, glmark2 was just imported from the AUR to the Arch community repo so we dropped our overlay. chromium and libreoffice-fresh packages were fast-tracked previously.

23

How often do you check for orphan and foreign packages?

  • After every update automated (hook or script)
  • After every update manually
  • Once a month
  • Once a year
  • When I think about it
  • Never

0 voters

When you come across orphan packages, what do you do?

  • Leave them alone
  • Just remove them
  • Remove after doing some research
  • Mark them --asexplicit, so they don’t appear in the list
  • Don’t know enough to take action

0 voters

When you come across foreign packages, what do you do?

  • Update IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf and use as-is until it dies
  • Look for alternative software in Manjaro’s repositories to fill the need
  • Use the AUR version of the package
  • If in the AUR, vote, and hope the package is promoted
  • Don’t need the software anyway, so remove it
  • Need something to fill the void, but removed it

0 voters

24

I’m not 100% confident on the whole overlay business, but I’m getting there :slight_smile:

Where would I report a feature request for the “package changes” report that appears in the announcements?

Content moved to: Feature request for the "package changes" report that appears in the announcements

At this time, I sort of think of orphans, foreign packages and software removed as one project after an update.

25

:point_right: Feature Request

26

With the lastest Stable Update, “Known issues and solutions”, “Switch to the base-devel meta package requires manual intervention” (pacman -S base-devel) reduced orphans from 15 to 7. Which makes sense given a number of the packages were the result of a limited, but needed, AUR packages.

Executing pacman -S -g 'base-devel' | wc -l resulted in a change of 27 to 18

27

Typically I use the one-liner as outlined in the Arch Wiki as root:

pacman -Qtdq | pacman -Rns -

and yes, there are many orphans usually of the development packages used by AUR packages. But I don’t mind cleaning them up, because if I need another AUR package, they get reinstalled as dependecies.

The only thing I am not sure sure about are flatpaks and how to prune them. Is it even necessary?

28

I’ll cleanup flatpaks from time to time using the following:

flatpak uninstall --unused

This only uninstalls runtimes that have been left over from removed apps and are no longer being used by others. You shouldn’t need to do this as an update should clean it up, But it has come in handy.

1 Like
30

In case you guys want some inspiration or just a tool to automate maintenance, this script should cover most use cases.

1 Like