4 ms·

Is it really based on devops culture? To me it always made sense to be able to say I want to do X, Y and Z... figure it out. Even distributions that have state-

Is it really based on devops culture? To me it always made sense to be able to say I want to do X, Y and Z... figure it out. Even distributions that have state-based procedural package managers could at least keep a list of things I actually want to use. I never understood Debian doesn't provide this by default, at the very list let me see the list of packages I explicitly installed. If I accidently install Gnome 3 and then remove it I'm left with a lot of useless junk everywhere bloating up my system. PS. I know there are some really fickle and obscure commands to get the list of explicitly installed packages PPS. Maybe Gnome 3 isn't the best example, except that it would definitely be an accident if I installed it. PPPS. The useless junk floating around probably shouldn't bother me that much, but it does.

zokier 12y ago
apt-get autoremove
marcosdumay 12y ago
As you noted, yes, Debian has a list of the packages you explicitly installed. The problem is with the recommendations, they are very numerous, and any package that the maintainer thinks should be used together with one of your automatically installed ones will make it stay. Anyway, NixOS is based on immutable states. It keeps lots and lots of states (much worse than Debian on that), but they shouldn't be a problem for anything (I've not used it enough in practice to be sure).