• Diff for "Cruft"

Introduction

Cruft is a tool to look over your system for anything that shouldn't be there, but is; or for anything that should be there, but isn't. It is available as package cruft in the debian archive.

This page is meant as a place to assemble ideas and guidelines about cruft usage from perspective of a Debian package maintainer or a system administrator, before properly integrating them as package documentation.

Purpose of this tool

This tool can be used for many purpose:

• tracking regressions in packaging on testing/unstable
• forensics analysis of ready-made OS image received from (sloppy) third parties that did undocumented changes
• bring inner peace

Work in Progress

Current open bugs about cruft found left over by packages:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=cruft;users=cruft-ng@packages.debian.org

https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=cruft-ng@packages.debian.org&tag=cruft

How to tag an existing bug

bts user cruft-ng@packages.debian.org , usertag 1017445 cruft

Guidelines on creating filters and explain scripts

• try to be as specific as possible, keeping a balance with complexity. For example if the package only creates files /foo/bar /foo/bar.0 /foo/bar.1 /foo/bar.2.gz and so on, then specify two patterns: /foo/bar and /foo/bar.*, not /foo**
• before adding a file to the filter, make sure that the package actually still uses it. Some packages delete some files in a postrm script which are pure leftovers from earlier versions.
• ...

Move some Cruft functionality in debhelper/dpkg

Cruft need to know which files will be removed by dpkg --purge; If those were in a machine-readable format, this would greatly reduce ad-hoc cruft ruleset, this could also make 'dpkg' itself better. proposal

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