I am the type of person to limp a Debian system along for well past its "sell by" date. Despite being an incredibly rock-solid distribution, Debian tends to accumulate cruft which makes it harder and harder to maintain until you finally bite the bullet and reinstall. These scripts somewhat help the problem by aleviating most of the headaches that come with maintaining an old install of Debian.
These scripts are NOT a project and I will provide NO support for them. These are simply my donation to the larger Debian stalwart community (which I am sure isn't just me... right..?) They are completely Public Domain so feel free to do whatever you want with them. However if you do change them to make them better, please email me. If it benefits you, it will probably benefit me as well :-).
This collection consists of two scripts:
list-root-set-packages.sh - Lists packages which are not
depended on by ANY other packages. I frequently had issues figuring
out which packages are libraries I no longer need and which ones would
uninstall half my system if I removed it. This will find things which no
other package cares about so you can safely remove it.list-residual-config-packages.sh - Lists packages which
have residual configs on the system. I always end up leaving these around
for far too long and this script helps me identify which packages I truly
don't care about keeping configs for, that way I can apt purge
them into oblivion and safe a few megs of disk space.These scripts do not require root to run and should work with just about any
shell you throw at them (I typically use bash). The only required
packages to have on your system for them to run are found in the standard
install of Debian.