[Info-vax] VSI strategy for OpenVMS

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Monday, September 27, 2021 at 5:17:31 AM UTC+13, chris wrote:
> Not uncommon to have /usr/lib full of various revisions of the same 
> library.

Everything in /usr/lib (and /usr/bin, and /usr/share, and all the rest of it) belongs to an installed package. If that package was auto-installed, then it was brought in as a dependency of another package. Ultimately you can trace the dependency chain back to something that the user explicitly asked for. Maybe they later change their mind, and don’t want it. So you have “apt-get autoremove”, which will clean up everything that is not (directly or indirectly) a dependency of such an explicit installation. Thus, everything stays clean and tidy.

And all the tools for managing this are part of the distro itself. After all, the distro maintainers themselves use the same tools.