Want to try out new software but also keep your system clean of packages that you do not use? Unless you keep good track of everything you install for a trial, you are likely to leave some unwanted packages on your system at some stage. Not that they generally do anything apart from take disk space (at least on Arch Linux), until one day when you are doing an update and you think “What is that package doing on my system?”.

One way I have found to keep track of packages you want to temporarily install is to have a sort of secondary package management system within the main pacman database. This is achieved through abuse of the dependency tracking features of pacman. Any package that is to be installed for a temporary period get installed with the --asdep flag. This tells pacman that the package is a dependency. Given no other package depends on it, it is what is commonly referred to as an “orphan” package and can be listed using pacman -Qtd . Currently on my system I have:

$ pacman -Qtd

gimp 2.6.11-6

vlc 1.1.10-6

