Cruft - a bit disheartened

[aethyr]

I've had gentoo installed now for about 6 months, and so far the experience has been positive.

I consider myself a cautious user. I run x86 stable, I never use "emerge -u world" (instead, I upgrade packages individually), and I generally like to maintain a clean system (i.e. packages installed outside of portage go into /usr/local). I also keep my world file neatly trimmed & organized (only keeping packages I know I need), and make use of depclean to keep the riffraff packages out.

I was happy to get the chance recently to try out this cruft script as featured in GWN, March 10, 2003:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/7243

Basically, as far as I can tell, it compiles a list of all the files on your system, then a list of all the files that should be in your system (according to the packages you have installed), and then diffs the two.

Well, I'm fairly pleased with the results, but there's still some things I'm not quite sure of.

First, /etc/ seems to have many files without owners, especially in /etc/X11/, /etc/gconf/, and /etc/init.d/

Secondly, it seems that packages which install things to the /etc/ directory, do not have their files cleaned out when unmerged. For example, I installed apmd and ettercap awhile ago. Over time, they have both been subsequently uninstalled. However, much to my surprised, both still retained directories in /etc/. I'm not sure why these configuration files are kept around (You don't ask to keep artwork around, if someone wants to backup config files that should be their responsibility, portage should fully unmerge software).

Thirdly, there seems to be a bunch of stuff left scattered around /usr/share/doc/. GCC-3.2-r1 left its entire documentation on my system, even though I unmerged it awhile ago to install GCC-3.2-r4, same with NVIDIA-GLX.

I'm mostly disappointed with the mess left in /etc and the fact that some directories (like documentation) are left behind after I uninstall packages.

I hate the idea of lost files drifting around my computer, and I think portage is advantageous in that it allows us to account for file ownership. However, if cruft is just left lying around through normal system administration tasks, then I know the situation can be improved.

Debian has maintained a version of Cruft since 1998
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/19 ... 00434.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/cruft.html

I think it would be useful for Gentoo to have an official tool that we can see if all our files are spoken and accounted for, or what's hiding in the darkest recesses of our harddrive.

[ecatmur]

I'm working on a Debian-style cruft script - you can see the results in this thread:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=152618

It still needs work to be taught about more packages but it's already fully usable on my system.

Hopefully by posting here I can attract mindshare