As discussed in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1065312 deborphan is
still a widely used and useful tool.

Unfortunately the package got removed completely from Debian testing
leaving users without it behind (now for testing and later for the next
stable).

Currently two suggestions have been placed there:

1. Re-introduce the package in the current state, a user had even
offered help / maintenance over there

2. Provide an alternative suggestion / migration to a tool having a
similar / same functionality

This issue was raised to make this more visible again (as the bug report
above got archived).

I agree, I knew deborphan had issues, but I haven't found an alternative.
In bug #1065312 some people mentioned using something akin to:

apt list '~i !~M'

which is pretty much the same as:

apt-mark showmanual

However, `deborphan -a` doesn't show all manually installed packages, it
shows the packages that aren't being depended on by other installed
packages.

It'd be nice to have an `apt list` or `dpkg-query` incantation that can
do this.

One addition, it seems Synaptic is internally also using deborphan:

https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/blob/0.91.3/common/raptoptions.cc#L202-L230

and the removal of deborphan seems to break this integration as well
silently / without prior notice to the user.

On 5/22/25 11:09, Ian MacDonald wrote:
 > How did your efforts go in picking up the torch?


Hi,

Unfortunately, I forgot all about this. Like you, I really only use
deborphan when doing upgrades and Trixie hasn't been released yet. If it
were a month or two earlier, I'd have tried to rush something to get
deborphan back into the archive - but it looks like Trixie will release
without it. At this point, it makes sense to update release-notes to
mention it, and/or get deborphan into Forky with a Trixie backport.

Thanks,
Andres