Cruft Remover (system-cleaner-gtk.deb) in the default desktop install?

[Lars Wirzenius]

Cruft Remover[*] is a small application for cleaning up a system so that
it looks a bit more like a freshly installed system. I wrote it for
intrepid, and it is included in main, but it was pulled from the default
install late in the cycle since it had not received enough user testing
and problems cropped up.

I would like to explore the possiblity of including it in the default
install for jaunty. For this, it would be good to have it included as
early in the cycle as possible so that any problems can be found (and
fixed) early rather than late.

Thus I ask the -desktop list if you would support this. If there's no
opposition, I'll ask some core-dev to edit the seeds later this week.

The spec for this is
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/JauntyCruftRemover for
those who want to read the details. None of the user interface changes
have been done yet, but that should happen in the near future.

The point has been raised that the program should be unnecessary. In
theory, things like update-manager should do any cleaning up. And
update-manager does do it, and the two programs will share code.
However, there is stuff that is unsuitable for update-manager to do,
such as removing .dpkg-old/new files before the sysadmin has had time to
review them, and for that, my program seems to me to still be useful.
Perhaps some day in the future, my program won't be useful anymore.

There are currently only command-line and GTK versions. I would love to
have people write interfaces for other toolkits/environment. Please
e-mail me off-list if you want to write one. It should be reasonably
simple, I hope.


[*] The name of the program is currently Cruft Remover. The name was
originally System Cleaner, but that turned out to be a trademarked name.
The package name is still system-cleaner (system-cleaner-gtk for the GUI
version). The current name is still bad, so I would like to rename it
again, and the strongest candidate is Computer Janitor. (I'm open to
suggestions for the name.)