purge mailman (remove everything)

thufir hawat.thufir at gmail.com
Sun Jan 5 00:34:35 UTC 2014


I'm having a permissions problem with mailman, so tried to purge it, but 
some directories aren't empty, so it doesn't actually remove mailman:

thufir at dur:~$ 
thufir at dur:~$ sudo apt-get purge mailman
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer 
required:
  apache2 apache2-bin apache2-data libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-
ldap
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  mailman*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 35.0 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
(Reading database ... 207667 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing mailman ...
 * Stopping Mailman master qrunner 
mailmanctl                                                      [ OK ] 
find: `/usr/lib/mailman': No such file or directory
Purging configuration files for mailman ...
find: `/usr/lib/mailman': No such file or directory
Purging files from ucf 
database ............................................... done.
dpkg: warning: while removing mailman, directory '/var/lib/mailman/
archives/private' not empty so not removed
dpkg: warning: while removing mailman, directory '/var/lib/mailman/
archives/public' not empty so not removed
dpkg: warning: while removing mailman, directory '/var/lib/mailman/qfiles' 
not empty so not removed
dpkg: warning: while removing mailman, directory '/var/lib/mailman/lists' 
not empty so not removed
Processing triggers for ureadahead ...
ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot
Processing triggers for man-db ...
thufir at dur:~$ 
thufir at dur:~$ sudo apt-get purge mailman -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package 'mailman' is not installed, so not removed
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer 
required:
  apache2 apache2-bin apache2-data libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-
ldap
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
thufir at dur:~$ 
thufir at dur:~$ 


I can manually remove /var/lib/mailman easily enough, but isn't the point 
of purge to remove those directories?  It's my intention.

The man page says:

       purge
           purge is identical to remove except that packages are removed 
and purged (any configuration files are deleted too).

is there a version of remove which will take out everything mailman 
installs?  I would naively take that to be purge, but I suppose /var/lib/
mailman isn't actually a config file.


thanks,

Thufir





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