Re: library cleanup after a system upgrade

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 06:04:25PM +0200, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> this is quit clear and makes sense to me. I wondered if there existed a
> ready script for 2) to share...
> 
> I would check if the .so.x file has a corresponding symlink, if it has,
> it is latest version, else it is old.

That is not needed (old minor versions are removed, only old major versions
stay around and also keep a symlink).

I dimly remember a perl script that used ldd and walked through all binaries
and libs (including pkgsrc) to find all still referenced .so, and then
generated a list of the actually obsolete ones. But this is a minor space
saver only.

> FreeBSD does it with upgrade:
> 1) update system
> 2) updat all packages
> 3 re-run update to cleanup

In NetBSD we have a strict focus on binary compatibility, so usually it is
not required to update everything - and sometimes it is a pain to update
old stuff. But binary compatibility only helps if you keep the old libs
around.

Martin