Fully Removing Packages

If you remove a package with the builtin package manager, are there any leftover files or directories that you could clean up manually?

Any additional important information also appreciated.

Did you try gc?

(v1.whatever)> rm PkgToRm
(v1.whatever)> gc
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Thanks.

No. Can you be clearer and more specific?

What I did do is simply go into the Julia directory (not where Julia itself is installed), where settings and so on are in the user directory, and manually remove what seemed safe to remove.

One thing to note about the official Julia docs is that the current Pkg section is really just a high-level summary of the package manager. If you want lots of detail the Pkg docs on github are better. For the package garbage collector function, see here.

In general, removing a package via rm does not delete the files from your local .julia directory. To do this you also need to run the Pkg.gc function (docs linked above), which removes the files for any packages that are detected as being no longer needed.

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BTW, sure, you can go into ./julia/packages/ and delete whatever you want to. However, you and the package manager may disagree on what is “leftover” :slight_smile:

In theory, even if you delete something that is still being used, then the package manager should just pull a fresh copy from github the next time the package is called. In practice, if you manually mess around with your package files, or especially with the files in ./julia/environments/ then eventually you’ll probably break something.

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Thanks for your input. I might have a look at those links.

Yes, I thought that the package manager might disagree with me :slight_smile:

(I saw a message about a dirty something (I forgot the exact message; was already a while ago). I would think at the moment it has to do with it.)