Packages of succeeding numerical versions

[mint123]

Mint comes with many of them. For example, I have in my Mint..

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g++, g++-4.4, g++-4.6

then there is

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gcc gcc-4.3-base, gcc-4.4-base, gcc-4.4, gcc-4.5 base, gcc-4.6 base gcc-4.7 base

and libavocdec52 & libavcodec53

libaformat52, libavfomat53, libavutil49, 50 and 51

there are others.

Is it a good idea to keep them all or should I just keep the most recent?

[Aging Technogeek]

Quite often this situation is due to applications needing different versions of a dependent app in order to run properly. To be certain of which versions could be safely removed, you would have to check the dependencies of all installed programs.

Luckily, Linux has a method of doing this. Open a terminal and enter

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sudo apt-get autoremove

This will search for all files that are no longer used for anything and give you the option to remove them.

[squeezy]

I use a package called 'upgrade-system'. It's a script that runs deborphan and looks for unused dependencies and deletes them. On a recent Mint 13 MATE clean install it removed over 120 packages. It's never broken a system and I've been using it for almost 6 months now. I rebuild my workstation frequently, testing new installs and methods. I use it on every build I do. It installs 4-5 dependencies, all very small.

To install look for upgrade-system in Synaptic, or from a terminal use:

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sudo apt-get install upgrade-system

It runs from a terminal, no GUI:

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sudo upgrade-system

Finds much more than autoremove does. Guaranteed that if a package remains after running this, it's still needed by something else

[mint123]

Thanks for the comments guys. I have some mono stuff and a few other libraries available for autoremvoe but deborphan shows me a big list of other things.

Squeezy, update-system seems to be a nice all in one way to update and remove old stuff. I will add --no-install-recommends to the config file.