Packages

We remove unneeded services and packages from this repository, because carrying old configurations forever into the future increases the maintenance burden of this repository. If you don’t know whether a package is still required, you can inspect the package.

The ./manage.py command has services and packages sub-commands to identify unusual services and packages, and an autoremove sub-command to list candidates for removal.

Inspect packages

Connect to the server and:

• Show what files the package installs:

  dpkg -L PACKAGE
  

• Show what packages the package depends on (after Depends: and Recommends:):

  apt show PACKAGE
  

• Show what packages depends on this package:

  apt rdepends PACKAGE
  

For example, the above commands show that redis is a metapackage (installing only documentation) that depends on redis-server, and that python3-virtualenv provides library files whereas virtualenv provides a binary file (needed by Salt).

List manually installed packages

This StackOverflow answer works best. On Bytemark servers:

comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sort -u) <(gzip -dc /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz | sed -n 's/^Package: //p' | sort -u)

On Hetzner servers, the /var/log/installer directory is missing. The Ubuntu manifest can be used as an approximation:

comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sort -u) <(curl -sS https://releases.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-18.04.5-live-server-amd64.manifest | cut -f1 | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u)