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Remove a PPA and roll back changes in Debian

Posted in Linux

If you’re a Ubuntu user, you may be familiar with ppa-purge. It’s a handy little automated script to remove a PPA and roll back the version of any apps installed from that PPA. Debian doesn’t have this nicety by default but there’s a relatively simple way to get something close.

Firstly, remove your PPA from /etc/apt/sources.list or from the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory.

Do an update:

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sudo apt-get update

Find any packages that are now obsolete:

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aptitude search '?obsolete'

For me this returned the following:

# aptitude search '?obsolete'
i A libmysqlclient18      - MySQL database client library                                                                           
i A mysql-client-5.5      - MySQL database client binaries                                                                          
i A mysql-server-5.5      - MySQL database server binaries and system database setup                                                
i A mysql-server-core-5.5 - MySQL database server binaries                                                                          
i A ruby-passenger        - Rails and Rack support for Apache2 and Nginx

Now just remove the listed packages with apt-get remove and reinstall as necessary. It’s not quite the automated tool that ppa-purge is, but it’s a pretty good start.