Remove unnecessary updates

[Jason]

Hi All, we've just recently implemented Casper Suite. All of our systems are on Mavericks. Is there an easy way to remove pre-mavericks updates in "Software Update" since those are not applicable to the environment? i.e. we probably don't need "Mac OS X Update 10.4.11"....

I was thinking a solution would be to remove the otherCatalogs listed in swupd.plist:
index-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog
index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog
index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog

And just leave this:
index-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog

Would that do the trick? Or is there a better (any) way?

[Josh_S]

The way Apple's software update catalog files are organized is that the most recent version merges updates for all previous versions of the OS. So older OS versions don't "see" updates that they aren't compatible with, but newer OS installations just ignore updates that don't apply to them.

Don't have a lot of help to offer on the subject though. A few people have posted ideas on here about going in and manually culling obviously old updates, starting with the largest ones like combo updaters, and then deleting them to reclaim disk space, but nothing quite so easy as just editing a preference file.