Remove extra packages and streamline 6.2

[Martin Tournoij]

On Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 09:15:34PM -0500, Joshua Lewis wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> After many days of hard work, a lot of caffeine and not nearly enough sleep I have a working 
> asterisk PBX for my home.
> 
> I have it working on a PIII 800 with 512MB of RAM and two 5GB drives in a Raid1 config. While this 
> system should suffice I would like to streamline the system a little.
> 
> I installed a lot of unnecessary applications during sysisntall. Is there a way to figure out what 
> software I don't need. I did a pkg_info | wc -l and found that I have 63 apps installed. I know I 
> don't need a bunch of these but I am afraid to delete random packages. After having a non working 
> phone for two weeks my wife would kill me if I messed it all up again.
> 
> Any ways I know I don't need xorg any more. I installed it so I could use gastman to try and get my 
> Asterisk config working faster.  I never wound up using gastman so now I need to remove it and xorg. 
> But there are a bunch of fonts and docs and things.
> 
> Is it possible to remove any packages I have not used for X amount of days?
> 
> Is there some way to figure out what apps I don't need installed anymore?
> 
> Are there any other ways to streamline a system?
> 
> I removed everything from rc.conf except the basics. Hostname, defualtrouter, ifconfig, keyrate, 
> linux_enable, saver, sshd, asterisk.
> 
> Here is what I have installed.
> 
> [PKG_INFO SNIP]
> 
> 
> Sincerely,
> Joshua Lewis
> joshua.lewis at familyfunzone.net
 
You can use stat to see when a file was last accessed, 

for example, on my system stat -x /usr/local/bin/7z show (among other
things):
Access: Mon Jan 15 00:34:11 2007

So, I last used 7z on jan 15th, at 00:34.

I suppose you could write a script to automatically  remove packages
which haven't been used for a X amount of time, but I would not
recommend doing this, because you might accidentally remove a package
you don't want to remove.
Examples would be dos2unix, antiword, 7zip, packges you might not use
a lot, but sure come in handy at times!

Also, it would require quite some work, probably more work than you'll save.

Another hint may be this:
pkg_info -adrR > PKGINFO

This will generate a list of all your installed packages including
dependency's and a description (from pkg-descr)
Drop the -d flag if you don't want descriptions.