Shared resources and reference counting

The title says it all. For two shared resources in particular, !System and !SharedLibs, I have wished that they could have been equipped with some mechanism to ease the problem of deleting unwanted resources. As it is, each new application insouciantly bungs its relocatable modules, or shared C libraries, into !System or !SharedLibs, without a thought as to how the reverse process, the deinstallation, should proceed. What was needed from the beginning was a textual database that the OS could easily parse and query, to make the business of pruning the dead wood easier.

Could it be retrofitted? Too complicated? Not needed?