[SOLVED]Preparing upgrade to buster

[cuckooflew]

How do I know which ones I do not use - which is what popcon-largest-unused is supposed to do?

Yes, and it does,

Code: Select all

popcon-largest-unused(8)                              popcon-largest-unused(8)

NAME
       popcon-largest-unused - List size of unused packages

SYNTAX
       popcon-largest-unused

DESCRIPTION
       Based  on  the  list of unused packages reported by popularity-contest,
       this program extract the package size from the APT cache, and list  the
       unused packages sorted by size.

FILES
       /var/log/popularity-contest

AUTHORS
       Yann Dirson <dirson@debian.org>

SEE ALSO
       popularity-contest(8)

Yann Dirson                                           popcon-largest-unused(8)
 

Of course if you don't have any packages that you do not use, it would not return anything. I have chores to do, and now I am not sure what it is you expect, again I will repeat my suggestion, if you have questions about the popularity-contest package, the ones that could answer them best are the developers and maintainers.
Yes it is just a perl script, and a pretty basic one, but I don't see where that is relevant.

[geoffkaniuk]

Have you actually run popcon-largest-unused?

Yes I did run it, The output :

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$ popcon-largest-unused
262954 linux-image-4.19.0-9-amd64
16106 locales
8916 libpython2.7-stdlib
...


Great! This means my code (or config) is faulty. So now I will send a message to maintainer and later file a bug report. Thanks for all your effort here!

[Head_on_a_Stick]

It depends on how one wants to handle a release upgrade. Aptitude does it just fine

Not according to https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=411280 ← that's why the official guides don't recommend aptitude(8).