Can a .deb package remove other packages

aptdebpackage-management

I'm trying to make a lightweight VM based on Xubuntu. I want to start with a stock Xubuntu installation and then remove any packages that I don't need.

My concept is to build a .deb package that removes the unneeded packages. I've been reasonably successful specifying that my package conflicts with the ones I want to remove. For example:

Conflicts: gnumeric, thunderbird, blueman, mousepad, xchat, etc...

This causes the named packages to be removed when my package is installed.

The problem comes later: if I want to re-install, say, Thunderbird, doing so will cause my package to be uninstalled.

What's a good way to clean up the system in an automated manner? Can the postinst script be used to remove packages?

Best Answer

How about splitting your package into two: one part that contains the real functionality, and another part that conflicts with the packages you want to remove. Make the first package recommend the second package so that it gets installed by default, but if you later want to install something that your package conflicts with, then you can choose to remove your second package. That shouldn't be a problem as the cleanup has already taken place.

Related Solutions

Debian – How to remove gnome-games package without removing other packages

It appears that all of those were automatically installed as dependencies of the gnome metapackage. As you said, the gnome metapackage is incomplete without the gnome-games package, so it must be removed. That renders all the packages listed unused and so aptitude wants to remove them. There may be a way to remove gnome without removing its unused dependencies, but a quick search didn't show one and I suspect that it would try to uninstall them every time you removed something else. Your best bet is probably to figure out which of those packages you explicitly want and mark them manually installed, then let it uninstall the remainder if they're still unneeded.

How to get information about deb package archive

You can use dpkg-deb command to manipulate Debian package archive (.deb).

From manpage:-

-I, --info archive [control-file-name...]
              Provides information about a binary package archive.

              If  no  control-file-names are specified then it will print a summary of the contents of the package as
              well as its control file.

              If any control-file-names are specified then dpkg-deb will print them in the order they were specified;
              if  any  of  the components weren't present it will print an error message to stderr about each one and
              exit with status 2.

Example Usage:-

$ dpkg-deb -I intltool_0.50.2-2_all.deb 
 new debian package, version 2.0.
 size 52040 bytes: control archive=1242 bytes.
     831 bytes,    19 lines      control              
    1189 bytes,    18 lines      md5sums              
 Package: intltool
 Version: 0.50.2-2
 Architecture: all
 Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
 Original-Maintainer: Debian GNOME Maintainers <pkg-gnome-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
 Installed-Size: 239
 Depends: gettext (>= 0.10.36-1), patch, automake | automaken, perl (>= 5.8.1), libxml-parser-perl, file
 Provides: xml-i18n-tools
 Section: devel
 Priority: optional
 Multi-Arch: foreign
 Homepage: https://launchpad.net/intltool
 Description: Utility scripts for internationalizing XML
  Automatically extracts translatable strings from oaf, glade, bonobo
  ui, nautilus theme and other XML files into the po files.
  .
  Automatically merges translations from po files back into .oaf files
  (encoding to be 7-bit clean). The merging mechanism can also be
  extended to support other types of XML files.

You can list the content by dpkg-deb -c:-

Example Usage:

$ dpkg-deb -c libnotify-bin_0.7.6-1ubuntu3_i386.deb 
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      9764 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/bin/notify-send
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/share/man/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/share/man/man1/
-rw-r--r-- root/root       773 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/share/man/man1/notify-send.1.gz
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:24 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:25 ./usr/share/doc/libnotify-bin/
-rw-r--r-- root/root      1327 2011-07-31 03:11 ./usr/share/doc/libnotify-bin/copyright
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:25 ./usr/share/doc/libnotify-bin/AUTHORS -> ../libnotify4/AUTHORS
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:25 ./usr/share/doc/libnotify-bin/NEWS.gz -> ../libnotify4/NEWS.gz
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2014-02-22 05:25 ./usr/share/doc/libnotify-bin/changelog.Debian.gz -> ../libnotify4/changelog.Debian.gz

Getting licensing information:-

Most of archive's copyright information is available from /usr/share/doc/<pkgname>/copyright

Example :-

$ dpkg-deb -c gparted_0.18.0-1_i386.deb | grep -i copyright
-rw-r--r-- root/root      1067 2011-12-08 00:34 ./usr/share/doc/gparted/copyright

Which you can extract by -x and look for License under which it is released.

Here:-

$ cat /usr/share/doc/gparted/copyright | grep -i ^license -A 5
License:

   This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; version 2 dated June, 1991.

For more, run man dpkg-deb.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Debian – How to remove gnome-games package without removing other packages

How to get information about deb package archive

Getting licensing information:-

Related Question