How to safely remove Issue Link Types?

[Jakub S]

I've found myself in a situation where the amount of possible Issue Link Types is overwhelming for basic users, and I would like to delete some of them in order to simplify the process.

Unfortunately this not as easy as it sounds, as I suspect many of the available Types origin in installed apps and simply removing them could cause related Apps to stop working. It seems like in order to safely remove these Types I would have to verify their origin, but there doesn't seem to be any such information in Administration > Issues > Issue Linking.

Any ideas how to find the origin of Issue Link Types or verify their dependencies? I did try to google them with little success, and due to a high number of installed Apps in our instance it's hard to pinpoint any single one as the culprit. 

[Radek Dostál · Accepted solution]

There is no reference to it Jira-wise. If an app has a dependency on an issue link, Jira does not know about it. It might not even be an app/client existing inside Jira, could be a remote application/client somewhere else using those links via REST, or issue search. Short answer is, there is no easy way to get a concrete list of dependencies.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The only way you could do (part of) this is to go to Admin -> manage apps, look at the list of user-installed apps, and read the documentation for each one you have active to find out what link types they actually need to be there in Jira.

You should do the same for external integrations too, but Jira can't tell you what they are, as they're not inside it.

[Filipi Lima]

I'll resuscitate this to drop a query that can be quite useful:

select count(*),il.linktype,ilt.linkname,ilt.inward,ilt.outward,ilt.pstyle from "issuelinktype"
ilt join "issuelink" il on il.linktype=ilt.id
group by il.linktype,ilt.linkname,ilt.inward,ilt.outward,ilt.pstyle;

With that you can tell how much each of the issue link types is being used without having to query for each one.

Note that it will consider archived tickets as well.

[Dave Lewis]

We should be able to deactivate link types so that the old ones remain in the old tickets, but can't be selected by anyone moving forward, or, there should be link schemes (or, both of these options).  

[Jakub S]

Thank you for your answers!

I guess I must accept that there's a lot of tedious labour ahead of me.