System freshness

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

Hello!

Might be a kind of -devel question, or maybe something for the IdeaPool in
the wiki.....

What I need, is something like system consistency checker, i.e. a program
which tells me, which legacy elements my system has and maybe even
resolves them.

For example: my system has been installed about three or more years ago. I
went through Debian Woody -> Debian Sid (daily updated) ->
Sid+Experimental -> (recently) Ubuntu Hoary. In this time, for example my
/dev has been migrated normal -> devfs -> udev, many installation features
changed (new installation get a /media, various sub-filesystems are maybe
now mounted to a tmpfs, etc.).  But my system is now never as fresh as a
newly installed one - for example, udev is telling me at each boot that
"old .udevdb/ exists", later on something else tells me that "udev already
active" etc. My notebook, which has been installed about a half a year
ago, doesn't have these problems.

udev is particularly weird, as it used to have different directories for
different things, so I'm not really sure now, which is right at the
moment. As far as I've understood that, udev is mounted on a tmpfs, but
what should be in /dev, when it's not mounted, so that the system can
boot?

Does anyone have any recommendation for keeping the system _fresh_,
considering FHS, LBS and others, without re-installing it once in a while?

Thank you.

-- 
Nikolai Prokoschenko 
nikolai at prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik at jabber.org