I was recently asked how to get rid of the old and unused packages without having to reinstall?
Debian have the mechanisms to deal with this and more. Unfortunately for new people, its not as automated and a little more obscure that i would like
Anyway, heres what i would do:
# apt-mark showmanual
# apt-mark auto <packages you dont recognize>
# apt purge <packages you recognize but dont want anymore>
# apt autoremove --purge
In this day and age, reading debian forums, I still see $ dpkg --get-selections as the recommended way to copy the list of packages installed on one machine in order to install the same packages on another machine
This list misses vital information… such as which of those packages were automatically installed as dependence!!!
If you dont want to break your new installation so early on, use $ apt-mark showmanual instead for the list of packages. It will show only packages that you manually installed. You should get the rest as dependences
The mime type is a little text like image/jpeg or application/pdf that is used to identify the content of a file. Its main use is to determine what program can handle each file
Theres been this problem where the default program offered by debian were a very awkward one. Like trying to use the notepad.exe that comes with wine to open .txt files. In linux we dont rely on extensions to determine the content of a file, but still wines registers itself as being able to handle text/plain files using its wine-extension-txt.desktop file
The reason this happens is that in some lightweight desktops (like xfce), it will default to the last program installed (or upgraded!!!) that can handle the file, unless you define a default one yourself
I fixed this weird behaviour a long time ago by using strace |grep home to locate the file that was being used and updating it. In this case
~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
It was fast, but I never really understood why it happened on the first place
This post found on planet debian digs a little deeper using a different but longer approach and was used to find the reason behind it. Good catch!
The proposition on the original docs is slightly complex because it involves bringing the bare repo to the server, check a lot of things and run exotic gitolite commands
My solution is easier and without having to touch anything server side
Create the repo in gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf and push it. This creates an empty bare repo remotely
Go to some copy of the existing repo you want to move to gitolite
$ #Configure your repo url as origin
$ git remote add origin your.gitserver:repo.name.from.step1
$ #Push the repo
$ git push origin master
$ #Assign current branch (master) to origin/master
$ git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master
Profit!!!
# apt install xul-ext-refcontrol
And select the default you want. Either block or use base url if you want to be more discreet ;)
$ apt showsrc <binary-package-name>
I posted this because the solutions offered in planet debian were very convoluted