Re: [gentoo-user] Installing outside of Portage & cruft removal

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> What do you guys think of this?  Do you know of a good cruft removal script?
>>>>>
>>>> Yep, there's quite good one in gentoo itself.
>>>>
>>>> Basically, you'll need to write a short config for it, consisting of
>>>> lines like "cruft name", "cruft src uri" and a few more lines if you'll
>>>> need to pass some extra parameters to configure/make/install.
>>>> It'll build the package in a sandbox, then transfer it to destination,
>>>> memorizing every change it did and preventing collisions and config
>>>> overwrites.
>>>>
>>>> Just put that config script into an ebuild file and use portage to
>>>> build it - as simple as it gets ;)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I suppose you and Jesus are right, but what about cruft removal?  Are
>>> you saying Gentoo is 100% cruft-free?  I've got a lot of junk in /etc
>>> and especially ~/.*
>>>
>>> - Grant
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
> [snip]
>> You have to clean out /etc and home directories yourself.
>
> Exactly.  Nothing to help me along?  I'll check out qfile, but I'm
> surprised there isn't a good script for this.
>
> I'm the only one interested in a filesystem audit?
>
> - Grant
>
>
>> Portage does do a good job of removing all the other files tho.  If it
>> puts it there, it will remove it if you unmerge a package.
>>
>> Dale

I think if you enable auditing in the kernel and emerge
sys-process/audit you can see the access history of any file on your
system. (doesn't help after the fact, but going forward...) At least
then you could see which user/program did things to which files. I
think even if a file is missing that you think should have been there
you can do an audit search and see who deleted it. I've never tried it
myself but that's how I understand it. I could be wrong.

And it's not what you asked for, but for cleaning cruft out of
distfiles i use eclean from app-portage/gentoolkit... works great.
Whenever I'm running low on space I run it and it zaps a few gigs of
unneeded stuff without deleting the distfiles of active packages.

Paul