Package: cruft

[Derek Broughton]

NoOp wrote:

> On 10/17/2007 12:14 PM, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> NoOp wrote:
>> 
>>> Has anyone used this package?
>>> 
>>> http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/admin/cruft
>>>> Find any cruft built up on your system
>>>> 
>>>> cruft is a program to look over your system for anything that
>>>> shouldn't be there, but is; or for anything that should be there, but
>>>> isn't.
>>>> 
>>>> It bases most of its results on dpkg's database, as well as a list of
>>>> `extra files' that can appear during the lifetime of various
>>>> packages.
>>>> 
>>>> cruft is still in pre-release;
>> 
>> !! That's as bad as Wine.  I haven't used "cruft" in 7 or 8 years!
>> 
>>>> your assistance in improving its
>>>> accuracy and performance is appreciated.
>>> 
>>> Given that I've upgraded my systems over time from Dapper > Edgy >
>>> Feisty > Gutsy, this package caught my eye & I am thinking that it might
>>> be a useful program to go through and check/clean my systems.
>>> 
>>> man cruft seems to indicate that this thing will take off & start
>>> removing things if the correct parametors are not set in the command. So
>>> I figure I'd better check here first to see if anyone has used it, and
>>> if so, what their experience has been.
>> 
>> I'm fairly sure that it didn't _used_ to remove things, but it's been so
>> long...
> 
> Well... I fired it up on my test server and piped the output to a file.
> I end up with a 6405 line document of which:
> 
> - 15 lines of "missing: gpkg" info
> - 5 lines of "unexplained: proc-syst-fs-binfmt_misc" info
> - remaining lines are "unxeplained: /" info
> 
> Samples of "unexplained: /":
> 
> ---- unexplained: / ----
>         /bin/sh
>         /boot/grub/installed-version
>         /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-12-server
...
>         /etc/X11/xorg.conf.20071012092606
>         /etc/aliases
>         /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
> 
> Me thinks that I'll give this package a pass... at least until I
> understand what it's about.

That's why I stopped using it.

All it does is compare the files on your system to the ones that were
installed from packages, so you have to write a fair number of rules to
tell it what to exclude (iirc, it skips most of the fairly obvious stuff
like /home, /tmp, /var/tmp).

Still, I would have thought /bin/sh should have been found in a package
(bash), but I'm fairly sure the rest of the sample list was correct - the
xorg.conf files are obvious backups, and the rest are all created by
scripts rather than being actually included in the relevant packages.

I would think cruft is really useful on a production system where you _know_
what's supposed to be there, but on a personal system where I install (and
mostly remove) 5-10 packages a week, it's pretty pointless :-)
-- 
derek