Package History as a Behavioral Journal¶

Source: hooks/ways/workstation/pkghistory/pkghistory.md

Frontmatter

Field	Value
`description`	going over the stuff you have added to a machine over time and deciding what you no longer need — auditing a workstation for forgotten, unused, or leftover software you installed and stopped using, reviewing what accumulated, grouping it by subject, and trimming the cruft. The retrospective audit-and-cull side of installing software, distinct from project dependency management.
`vocabulary`	`stuff I added installation machine workstation unneeded dont need anymore no longer use forgotten unused leftover smelly leftovers cruft accumulated go over review audit clean up trim prune get rid of remove uninstall what did I add what have I installed group by subject still need AUR yay go over the stuff I added go over what I installed`
`pattern`	`stuff i.?ve added\|what (did\|have) i install\|(unneeded\|leftover\|forgotten\|unused) (things\|stuff\|packages\|software)\|(don.?t\|do not) (need\|want) (it\|them\|this\|that\|th[eo]se\|any ?more)\|no longer (use\|need)\|(clean up\|get rid of\|trim\|prune\|cull).{0,30}(cruft\|leftover\|smelly\|packages)\|smelly .{0,20}leftover`
`refire`	`0.12`
`scope`	`agent`

The package manager's log is an involuntary journal. The user never sat down to write it, but every line is timestamped intent they couldn't fake in retrospect. When someone asks "what have I added that I don't need anymore?", don't just dump a package list — read the log as a time series. The shape is the answer.

Three signatures¶

Signature	What it looks like	What it means
Burst	Several related packages on the same day	One focused sitting with a goal (set up remote desktop, rice the desktop, tune the CPU). Burst density ≈ how deep the flow state was.
Thread	A theme recurring across months	Durable identity, not a whim. A persistent interest the log proves. Keep it.
Orphan	A cluster that appeared once and never recruited a neighbor or got revisited	Abandoned. This is the strong cull signal — not age. Old ≠ unused; a stable tool used daily can be a year untouched. A theme that stopped recruiting is done.

The builder layer is the sharpest marker: packages the user authored themselves (their own AUR/local builds) mark a need no existing tool fit. They cluster around whatever the user was deep in at the time.

What the log cannot see¶

Install ≠ use. No telemetry on what actually runs. The log shows intent, not habit.
Survivorship. pacman -Qm / brew leaves show only what survived. For the true series — including removals and upgrade churn — read the transaction log, not the current state.

Extraction¶

Manager	Deliberate adds	Dated history (incl. removals)
pacman/yay	`pacman -Qm` (foreign), `pacman -Qet` (explicit leaves)	`/var/log/pacman.log` (`installed`/`removed`/`upgraded`, all timestamped)
apt	`apt-mark showmanual`	`/var/log/apt/history.log*`
dnf	`dnf history userinstalled`	`dnf history`
brew	`brew leaves`	`~/Library/Logs/Homebrew` / `brew info --json` install times

Dated AUR list (pacman): expac --timefmt='%Y-%m-%d' '%l\t%n' $(pacman -Qmq) | sort

Focus pass 1 on deliberate adds (AUR/manual) — native repo leaves are mostly DE/base noise. Group by subject, then call out redundancy clusters inside each group (two remote-desktop stacks, three themes only one of which can be active, a build-tool cluster left over from one project). That's where the cull candidates hide.

Render the timeline¶

Phases over time are sequential — show, don't narrate. Pipe a Mermaid timeline to mmaid for terminal art:

mmaid <<'EOF'
timeline
    title host — what the install log remembers
    2025-04 Bootstrap : shell, grub, mounts (provisioning, not exploring)
    2025-07 Infra sprint : whole remote-access stack in one sitting
    2026-05 Re-provision : browser+editor+toolchain in one burst
EOF

Don't¶

Flag "unneeded" by install date. Age is a weak signal; recruitment is the strong one.
Persist a curated inventory before the cull — documenting cruft that's about to be culled wastes the write. Cull first, then offer to record the post-cull state.
Remove without a reverse-dependency check (pactree -r / pacman -Rsp dry run). Let the user drive every "kill it".