Thiago Bellini's homepage Free software development, Open source software, Linux – by Thiago Bellini

PPA-Purge: The best friend for people who lives on Bleeding Edge

If you, like me, love to live on Bleeding Edge, probably you have a lot of PPAs added to your Ubuntu's Software Sources. What's the big problem? Unstable stuff can will crash sometimes.

What to do when you want to return a package (or some packages) from the PPA's version to the Ubuntu's official version (wich is considered to be more stable)? A solution could be removing the PPA entry from the sources.list and manually forcing each package to the version you want. Now think..What if a PPA upgraded something like 50 packages on your system? Will you manually downgrade each one? Will you remember all packages that it upgraded? Now comes the best part...you don't have to do that! Just call your best friend, PPA-Purge!

PPA-Purge will remove any PPA you added from your system and downgrade every package it upgraded with only one command.

How to install:

It's on Marverick's official repository and has been backported to Lucid Lynx. To install, just click here or run the following command:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

How to use:

Just run "sudo ppa-purge [the ppa you want to remove]".

Here are some usage examples. These examples bellow are the output of the command "ppa-purge --help"

• sudo ppa-purge xorg-edgers
• will remove https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

• sudo ppa-purge -p xorg-testing sarvatt
• will remove https://launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/xorg-testing

• sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
• will remove https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do! It sometimes can be a life-saver

Ps. The latest version of Ubuntu Tweak has integration with ppa-purge making it even easier to use!