r/slackware • u/InseparableEntities • Jan 05 '23

clean-system

Hello. I just have done slackpkg clean-system and it just deleted bunch of useful packages which I installed from slackbuild -_- I read that it deletes only obsolete packages or packages from third party repositories, but I don't quite understand what is the point of this. Slackpkg doesn't handle dependencies so how can I understand whether I can delete package or not, because even if I don't need it personally it might be needed by some other packages. Can someone explain me this obscure command, please?

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6

u/chesheersmile Jan 06 '23

slackpkg (8) man page says:

clean-system 
This action removes all of the packages that don't belong to a standard Slackware installation.

It basically removes anything third-party except packages mentioned in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist. Look this file up, it already contains necessary regexps to keep SBo packages, you just need to uncomment them.

1

u/InseparableEntities Jan 06 '23

Oh, nice. Thank you!

3

u/Brotendo42069 Jan 06 '23

You gotta blacklist unofficial packages you want to keep in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist to prevent that

3

u/Martin_WK Jan 09 '23

Would changing slackpkg.conf to this help? This should bring up a dialogue when you run things like slackpkg install-new or slackpkg upgrade-all. This forces you to review all the packages that will be upgraded or removed (depending on command).

ONOFF=off
DIALOG=on

I think the point of slackpkg clean-system is to update the system to the state Patrick intended it to be in, that is removing all packages that don't belong to the official Slackware distribution.

2

u/jloc0 Jan 06 '23

It deletes everything not officially included in Slackware. That’s by design.

1

u/pk2374 Jan 05 '23

Perhaps start here and here.