What are those directories, remnants?

Ask Fedora
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1

.cache/tracker3/ /var/lib/containerd/ /var/lib/docker/ Each one contributes for an extra GB.

I don’t use tracker. I thought I uninstalled everything related 3 years ago.

I don’t use docker. Well I did in the past, but uninstalled everything after testing.

2

The ~/.cache directory is just that - a cache. It won’t have been removed when you uninstalled tracker3, as it wasn’t put there by the installation.

I don’t have docker or containerd directories in /var/lib/ so you evidently missed it when you cleaned up.

3

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your reply.

I would concur. However, something is still writing to it. I have files witn dates of this month.
I deleted the dir. Will see if it’s recreated and investigate from that.

Strange that dnf remove <package> left that. In the debian world, one would do dpkg -P <package> and all files related to the package are purged. Isn’t there a similar functionality that I ignore with dnf ?
Deleted those directories.
However is there a way to purge leftovers in /var/lib? I’m sure some more are left there.

4

Have a read of the man page for dnf5-autoremove - perhaps these were installed by dependencies of the main package you installed.

5

Dnf will only remove files that is declared to be provided by the package that is being removed. There are currently no packages in Fedora which provides the directories /var/lib/containerd/ and /var/lib/docker/ so no dnf operation would touch them.

6

I see. That’s the way dnf operates. Confirmed by listing the files in packages from docker-ce-stable repo. I accept that.

Thanks for the reply!

Found similar answer there

7

Thanks for the tip. It removed some 140 packages. Nothing essential.

I think I need to explore the filesystem to get a better feeling of Fedora. I used to do that on Debian and I know how Debian operates for some 30 years.

I installed Fedora, used it on a daily basis, but never took the time to peruse the filesystem. So this is the thing I’ll do in the next days. Particularly ~, /etc, /var, /usr.

8

For the little I’ve seen of Ubuntu, the dpkg function has an option to more aggressively remove data and config files, and dnf doesn’t have such function.

9

~/.cache/tracker3 was recreated today. I checked some settings and found

$ gsettings get org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files enable-monitors
true

so I changed to

$ gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2 \
gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files enable-monitors false

Furthermore, I blocked the whole directory

$ rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker3
$ mkdir -p ~/.cache/tracker3 \
chmod 000 ~/.cache/tracker3 \
sudo chattr +i ~/.cache/tracker3