I like to keep my house clean, and so its natural that I like to keep my computer(s) clean too. Both ebb and flow from disaster areas to clean as whistles, and a good strategies for maintaining some level of organization is to have a system.
I've heard of one good strategy for household organization: put things back after you use them. Sounds easy enough.
Couldn't they put it in a language I understand? And make it automatic? Like this:
dpkg -l | grep ^rc | awk '{ print $2}' | xargs dpkg -P
Explanation: the above command does the following - it lists all packages that have been installed on a Debian system, filters out the ones that are actively installed, leaving only the ones that have been un-installed, yet still retain configuration files. It then parses out the package name, and then purges all of them. All in one fell swoop! Aren't computers awesome??