How to find out why something got installed?

[VIKINGS]

@apollo

You should stop using Brave then…Brave builds upon Chromium, the “open source core” of Google Chrome, which is mostly developed by Google.

Any before you think about switching to Firefox: Mozilla nowadays mostly still exists because of money it gets from Google/Alphabet.

Yeah, I know(about brave), sadly.
But there really isn’t much out there in terms of options when it comes to browsers, at least nothing I’ve seen and liked… And I figured doing something has to be better then doing nothing(aka staying on chrome), so brave it is, for now at least.

@manuel

Keeping disk space in good limits is up to you!
It is not rocket science…

Yeah right, tell winshit that!! (rage emoticon and !'s at it, not at you) Check out (mostly the lower half of) this thread if you wanna find out more about my disk space adventures and you don’t have better stuff to do with your time(which I’m guessing you do ).
LE: Ups, linked the wrong thread, my bad. Fixed now.

@dalto

No, it doesn’t work like that in linux.

The packages themselves are completely separate from their configuration and working files in most cases. Also, there is no registry or really anything similar to that.

Removing packages like go, only really frees a small amount of disk space. Unless you are very low on disk space, there won’t be any performance difference.

Well that’s a relief, good to know, thank you.

[VIKINGS]

Ok, once more I have no idea which post to select as solution, nor do I even really think just one single post deserves that in this case…
So I am just gonna quote a bunch of people, do some editing to keep the more relevant(IMO) parts, put them all in this post and mark this as the solution. Thus (hopefully) making it easier for future newbs like me who stumble upon it to learn.

Thank you everyone once again!

@pebcak

Pacman logs its actions in /var/log/pacman.log.

Look in there to see when the package you are talking about got installed.

You can also use pactree to have a look at what depends on it.

It may have been installed as a dependency of something you have installed from the repo or AUR.

You can always use man command line to view manual pages fro a command.
Example: man pactree

Or if you prefer: https://man.archlinux.org/

Also, the following site has a wealth of information: ArchWiki

@manuel

You could search something like this:

grep "installed go" /var/log/pacman.log

to find the date when go was (first) installed. Then around that line you might find the package that caused go to be installed.

This way I found pacseek has go as a dependency. You might find some other package.

Edit: this might help too (but a bit complicated…):

pacman -Qi $(pacman -Qq) | grep -n "^Depends On" | grep -w go

It shows if go depends on any of the installed packages.

@pebcak

Check pacman -Qm to list your foreign packages for example those from AUR.

Look them up in AUR pages to see which one depends on GO. Most probably it is the make dependency of something you installed from there.

@VIKINGS

LE: Ok, so I just finished going through the list pacman -Qm spit above and putting each entry into the aur website to see what dependecies it has. And the only one that seems to need go and go-tools is snapd 2.65.1-1 however:

1. Both go and go-tools have (make) at the end.
2. In the “Required by” section the only things I have installed on my system that might use it have (optional) at the end.

Given all that pretty please!! tell me that means they where only used/needed to build snapd and now I can uninstal/remove/purge them from my system without any issues?
And if yes, is yay -R go and yay -R go-tools enough or do I need to do something special?

@z580c

In my experience, if you try to uninstall a dependency that’s still in use pacman will tell you what it is that relies on it before asking if you definitely want to kill it.

So personally, I’d just run a quick backup of your choice via timeshift or whatever your poison is then run the uninstall command anyway

However, (make) on the AUR signifies that the package is only required as a dependency during installation, so it should be safe to remove anyway if that’s the only thing you have with it attached.

@manuel

Yeah, running e.g.

sudo pacman -R go go-tools

without really continuing the remove should let you see which packages need those. That should easily give you an idea why the go stuff was installed.

@manuel

It is possible that some AUR package you built & installed caused go stuff (install the the packages to the system and create folders in your $HOME).
But if it is not 100% sure what created the $HOME stuff, maybe you can first simply rename the go folder in your $HOME, and run your usual things as a test. If nothing bad happens, then you very likely can delete the renamed go folder from your $HOME.

And as @pebcak suggested, this can happen again, so please look at the pacman output to see if go stuff is going to be installed/upgraded again.

@manuel

snapd has go and go-tools as make dependencies meaning they are needed only when building a particular package. And tools like yay (if I remember correctly) should ask if you want to keep the make dependencies after the build or not. Probably you got them this way.