Can we expect a feature to remove unused dependencies?

[solidnoctis]

We should be able to uninstall unused dependencies. As a regular user may install only a few snaps, but as we continue to install and remove snaps, leaving all unused dependencies installed becomes impractical.

Currently, it’s challenging to manually identify which dependencies to remove:

Remove unused core and extension snaps

Over time quite a few snaps have accumulated on my system that got installed as a dependency for application snaps. E.g. there are multiple cores (core, core18, core20, core22) and extension snaps (such as gnome-3-38-2004, gtk-common-themes, kde-frameworks-5-96-qt-5-15-5-core20). Is there some efficient way to figure out which of those snaps are indeed not used anymore by any of the installed snaps and can be safely removed?

Can we anticipate a future feature that allows the removal of these unused dependencies? When might this be implemented?

Thanks, team.

[pedronis]

yes, as e.g. the list of coreXX bases grows, it is definitely something that we should look into supporting. I don’t have an immediate timeline for this though ATM.

[phw]

The core images are one thing, yes. But for these I think at least there is a check and you can’t remove one that is being used by an installed snap.

But there are also other things I have in my snap list like “gnome-42-2204”, “gtk-common-themes”, “hunspell-dictionaries-1-7-2004” which got pulled in by something else. But I don’t know which other snap uses those. I can remove them and snap will not complain. It’s probably not a hard dependency, but I don’t know what I loose and if it is being used by another snap.

[NovHak]

Concerning the non-core snaps, shouldn’t looking at their snap connections be enough to determine if they are used by another one ?