by jiml8 » Dec 17th, '19, 09:03
Following your suggestions, I removed about 800 old libraries, ranging from mga2 to mga6.
After first being awed by the size of the list that urpmq --not available gave me, I pulled them up by generation (rpm -qa | grep mga3 for instance), then scripted the return into a script that removed each entry with urpme. I ran the script, and said "yes" or "no" every time it told me of dependencies that had to be removed. I said "no" if any mga7 package was a dependency.
Actually, it turns out that Maria DB for Mageia 7 is still using a Mageia 2 library on my system. I didn't expect that...
After removing all the old libs this way, running urpmq --not-available turned up a short list that mostly consisted of RPMs I have installed from other sources (brother printer drivers and such). There were a couple of mageia RPMs on the list; urpme on them made them go away when they didn't show any current dependencies.
This freed about 2G on my system partition.
To this point, I have not noticed any ill effects. I would imagine that it will be awhile before I do notice any ill effects, if there are any. And if there are, I still have all those libs in my backup archive; I can always go and get any lib I absolutely have to have.