Comment 43 for bug 1599516

On 2016-09-05 05:00, Andrew Ziem wrote:
> If you can narrow it down to specific files that were deleted by
> BleachBit, you can have apt-get reinstall the affected package to
> undelete the files.

Indeed, but that person won't be me. In this case it seems to have affected both typing (there shouldn't be a need to clear all IM related environment variables on Ubuntu - the default setting "IBus" should work fine) and displaying of certain characters, and this makes it extra complicated.

> Also if you can figure out which files should not be deleted, I can
> work on whitelisting them to prevent them from being deleted again.

Not sure where I'd start. Generally it's a bad idea to delete selected package owned files instead of the packages, since they will be reinstalled at next package upgrade, so the whole concept with bleachbit is fragile and controversial.

I can mention two examples, which I find extra weird:

* The ubuntu-docs package only installs English content pages, together with symlinks to pages in other languages. Content pages in other languages are installed via language-pack-gnome-*-base packages as part of the language support for respective language. So there is already a space saving arrangement in place. Bleachbit still interferes and removes those symlinks in /usr/share/help/*/ubuntu-help! (Similar seems to be done unnecessarily for a few other help packages as well.)

* Bleachbit seems to remove locale definition files in /usr/share/i18n/locales which belong to the locales package. Why? If you want to affect which locales are actually generated, then the proper way to do it in 16.04 is to edit the /etc/locale.gen file. In general: Never mess with glibc provided packages if you don't really know what you're doing, or else bad things can happen.

Another thing which struck me is that several directories in /usr/share/X11/locale are removed, possibly jeopardizing the X system in an unpredictable manner and certainly breaking the XIM input method for those who want to use that.

My principal contribution to Ubuntu is about helping out with various localization issues. I monitor and patch a few packages and provide l10n/i18n related support. I suspect that various subtle issues which are reported are due to the use of bleachbit, and this bug report seems to be an example of it. Bleachbit probably causes quite some headache out there.

So I have my reasons for advising against the use of bleachbit, and I'm not inclined to spend more time on it.

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj