Cleaning up orphan packages

[start_something]

I'm having some issues with the storage available on my device.
I tried installing samba, and it ran out of storage space while installing dependencies. And now I don't know how to clean up.

What I would like is to remove any package that was pulled in as a dependency that doesn't have any other package that depend on it.

I found this script here:

[Solved] How to remove unused dependencies from LEDE?

To answer your original question, I have successfully used the advice given in this post: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=316052#p316052 This is the command given in the post: opkg list-installed | awk '{print $1}' | while read -r line; do if (opkg info $line | grep -q 'install ok installed'); then opkg --autoremove remove $line; fi; done

and this other script here:

[Solved] How to remove unused dependencies from LEDE?

at the risk of resurrecting a dead thread wanted to post this script I hacked together to find possibly orphaned packages. it checks installed packages against the original ROM list and for any dependencies. for i in `opkg list-installed |sed 's/ - .*//'`; do if !(cat /rom/usr/lib/opkg/status |grep -q "Package: $i") && !(opkg whatdepends $i |grep -q "depends on $i"); then echo $i; fi; done

But the first one doesn't seem to uninstall anything for me, and the second one only list packages that I (vaguely) recall installing some time ago.

One possible solution would be to just backup the device and reflash openwrt and only install what I need. But I thought there might exist a more graceful way to accomplish this.

[anon50098793]

@start_something

just backup the device and reflash openwrt and only install what I need

this ( or firstboot reset ) is the most graceful... ( unless you have extroot/non-default/non-squash-jffs partitions etc. )

there are currently no valid on-device heuristics without user instantiated metadata to determine user installed packages ( as is the case with example one which does not achieve what you are asking )...

example2 would be generally be ok I think, but it just prints and does not run the remove command... and it truly only finds orphans... ( not ascending recursive orphan-parents )
as the opkg dependancies switch has access to the primary package dependency list... it will achieve a closer outcome...

samba has alot of dependancies... most packages are not so dependency heavy to worry about this... ( well, i suppose the smaller the flash the more you'd need to worry or find a storage/hw solution rather than a package one )