I hope I’ve chosen the right bucket for this?
For many years, using OpenSuSE, I have found one key benefit of Linux is the simplicity of doing a system upgrade or new install while reliably maintaining all the data in my home directory. Though there may be ways to achieve it, I don’t automate reinstallation of my applications and do that manually from my ‘in-head’ list of essentials and then over time add in others on-demand. The result is that there are many blank taskbar, menu items and file associations, that represent the previous installation’s high tide mark of applications. The effect seems to be cumulative over several upgrades.
It would be great to be able to invoke a simple tool/command that would cleanse all these redundant and non-functioning entries and provide a checkbox list of all the potentially unwanted entries - pre-selected by default, so that the user can unselect any entries they actually want to keep (why?), and then press a ‘clean up’ button.
A command line equivalent could post the list of items to stdOut in a springClean --report-mode . A user could pipe the output to a JSON or YAML file, using springClean of=<file.yml> or springClean > <file.yml>, edit out stuff to keep and then re-run the command in a springClean --clean-mode if=<file.yml>, or <file.yml> > springClean --cleanmode to clean up.
Perhaps other switches/options on the tool could allow it, ie the user to choose one or more from menus, toolbars, file associations, etc. The ‘report-mode’/YAML should categorise the entries by these too.