[CentOS] necessary/unused rpm packages

Fri Sep 24 17:08:05 UTC 2010
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:15:58 -0700 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> Is there a way to identify if an rpm package is unused, or how much it is
> used?
> 
> I would like to reduce my load time by removing unused packages in my
> kickstart, but do not want to cause problems for users on active systems by
> guessing which ones are not necessary (I load everything with kickstart
> now).  If I could find the packages are not used I could start by excluding
> them from a load and be fairly certain my users would not be impacted.

rpm -q --whatrequires will show what packages depend on a given package:

sauron.deepsoft.com% rpm -q --whatrequires gcc
gcc-c++-4.1.2-48.el5
gcc-java-4.1.2-48.el5
gcc-gfortran-4.1.2-48.el5
apr-devel-1.2.7-11.el5_5.2
apr-devel-1.2.7-11.el5_5.2
sauron.deepsoft.com% rpm -q --whatrequires gcc-c++
no package requires gcc-c++
sauron.deepsoft.com% rpm -q --whatrequires gcc-gfortran

I *could* remove gcc-c++, expect that I frequently compile C++
programs...

Unless you ask your users, you won't know what packages/programs they
are actually using...

Presumably, you should have some idea of this already: are your users
office workers or computer programmers?  If office workers what sorts of
office productivity stuff do they do (write text documents, create bar
charts, create presentations, etc.)?  If computer programmers, which
programming languages do they use?  Do they use an IDE or make? 
Automake, autoconf, etc.?  Debuggers?

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