I’ve always been a big fan of managing my linux box by hand. I used to compile all my stuff, and when i finally broke down and went with rpms when available, I preferred to download them and install them myself, rather than use something like up2date, apt, or yum.
Since Fedora Core 3 though, I’ve been using yum more, and liking it a good bit. My old complaint that there wasn’t much available through it has passed with the advent of some excellent repositories (dag, livna, and nrpms).
As with most programs I use, I initially learned just what I needed to to get done what I wanted. And also as usual, later I started going through all the possible flags, just to see what was there. That’s how I found yum clean all. Basically it removed meta data about the apps you have installed, stuff that was needed during install, but isn’t anymore.
I’ve used yum on that machine for about 3 months now, and yum clean gave me back about 0.8 gig of space. Yow.
If it works just like the true apt (from Debian), it removes the actual packages that are copied during install. Either way, that is a lot of space that was being taken up by useless (sort of) stuff!
Wow, 0.8 gigs. Thanks. That’ll be handy.
I’m hoping yum will get a friend of mine to switch to Linux. He’d tried it, but hated the fact that almost every time he’d try to install something, it would refuse to install because of other packages required.