Remove Salt states¶

Note

This page describes a “meta” practice, in terms of maintaining the repository as a whole.

We try to 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.

In some cases, we keep unused states if they are simple and haven’t needed changes. At time of writing, these include nodejs, react_apps, yarn and redis.

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., However, on Hetzner and Linode servers, the /var/log/installer directory is missing. The Ubuntu manifest can be used as an approximation, for example:

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)