Safe to remove?

[Faris Raouf]

This is a bit of a dumb question, but better safe than sorry, I think.

Some time ago I upgraded a Proxmox 5.x system to 6.x (and obviously part of that was going from Stretch to Buster) following the Proxmox upgrade instructions exactly.

All is well and I'm having no problems.

But I note the following:

Starting system upgrade: apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libfdt1 python-pyasn1 pve-kernel-5.4.41-1-pve pve-kernel-5.4.44-1-pve
  pve-kernel-5.4.44-2-pve pve-kernel-5.4.60-1-pve 
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.

I know I can safely remove the old kernels.

But please can someone confirm that I can safely remove libfdt1 and python-pyasn1 too? They are no longer used by Proxmox (or were Stretch-specific)?

 

[ph0x]

If Apt tells you that a package can be removed then no other package has a dependency on it AND it wasn't manually installed. So what would you think that you need those packages for?

 

[Faris Raouf]

Thanks @ph0x . The problem with Proxmox is that I don't know what it might use something for. Clearly it needed libfdt1 python-pyasn1 at some point, or else they were installed by default by the 5.x installer for some reason. Certainly I didn't install them myself - I keep the system 100% clean, with nothing ever added by me.

I'm also a bit scared of Debian after finding the default for many commands is "-y" compared to Centos where it is "-n" if you see what I mean.
Debian is, even after a couple of years, still a bit of a mystery to me. I suppose it's my fault - although I regularly use Ubuntu, I do so via the desktop GUI and don't see the command line very often, so I'm not getting any non-Centos CLI experience.

 

[ph0x]

If you didn't install them yourself then they were definitely installed automatically and it's safe to remove them.
Fortunately, with apt the default is "-n".

 

[Dominic]

There is also a safeguard to prevent accidentally removing Proxmox VE:

root@pveA:~# apt remove libpve-storage-perl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libqrencode4 proxmox-archive-keyring proxmox-backup-client qrencode
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libpve-guest-common-perl libpve-storage-perl proxmox-ve pve-container pve-ha-manager pve-manager qemu-server
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 7 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
After this operation, 12.2 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
W: (pve-apt-hook) !! WARNING !!
W: (pve-apt-hook) You are attempting to remove the meta-package 'proxmox-ve'!
W: (pve-apt-hook) 
W: (pve-apt-hook) If you really want to permanently remove 'proxmox-ve' from your system, run the following command
W: (pve-apt-hook)     touch '/please-remove-proxmox-ve'
W: (pve-apt-hook) run apt purge proxmox-ve to remove the meta-package
W: (pve-apt-hook) and repeat your apt invocation.
W: (pve-apt-hook) 
W: (pve-apt-hook) If you are unsure why 'proxmox-ve' would be removed, please verify
W: (pve-apt-hook)     - your APT repository settings
W: (pve-apt-hook)     - that you are using 'apt full-upgrade' to upgrade your system
E: Sub-process /usr/share/proxmox-ve/pve-apt-hook returned an error code (1)
E: Failure running script /usr/share/proxmox-ve/pve-apt-hook