My Fedora machines need a cleanup of their /usr/sbin for Fedora 42

One of the things that Fedora is trying to do in Fedora 42 is unifying /usr/bin and /usr/sbin . In an ideal (Fedora) world, your Fedora machines will have /usr/sbin be a symbolic link to /usr/bin after they're upgraded to Fedora 42. However, if your Fedora machines have been around for a while, or perhaps have some third party packages installed, what you'll actually wind up with is a /usr/sbin that is mostly symbolic links to /usr/bin but still has some actual programs left.

One source of these remaining /usr/sbin programs is old packages from past versions of Fedora that are no longer packaged in Fedora 41 and Fedora 42. Old packages are usually harmless, so it's easy for them to linger around if you're not disciplined; my home and office desktops ( which have been around for a while ) still have packages from as far back as Fedora 28.

(An added complication of tracking down file ownership is that some RPMs haven't been updated for the /sbin to /usr/sbin merge and so still believe that their files are /sbin/<whatever> instead of /usr/sbin/<whatever>. A 'rpm -qf /usr/sbin/<whatever>' won't find these.)

Obviously, you shouldn't remove old packages without being sure of whether or not they're important to you. I'm also not completely sure that all packages in the Fedora 41 (or 42) repositories are marked as '.fc41' or '.fc42' in their RPM versions, or if there are some RPMs that have been carried over from previous Fedora versions. Possibly this means I should wait until a few more Fedora versions have come to pass so that other people find and fix the exceptions.

(On what is probably my cleanest Fedora 42 test virtual machine, there are a number of packages that 'dnf list --extras' doesn't list that have '.fc41' in their RPM version. Some of them may have been retained un-rebuilt for binary compatibility reasons. There's also the 'shim' UEFI bootloaders, which date from 2024 and don't have Fedora releases in their RPM versions, but those I expect to basically never change once created. But some others are a bit mysterious, such as 'libblkio', and I suspect that they may have simply been missed by the Fedora 42 mass rebuild.)

PS: In theory anyone with access to the full Fedora 42 RPM repository could sweep the entire thing to find packages that still install /usr/sbin files or even /sbin files, which would turn up any relevant not yet rebuilt packages. I don't know if there's any easy way to do this through dnf commands, although I think dnf does have access to a full file list for all packages (which is used for certain dnf queries).