Re: Buster's Strange Behaviour Purging Firefox-esr
On Sat, 3 Aug 2019 08:03:32 +0300
Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Vi, 02 aug 19, 21:36:17, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> > Hi! All --
> >
> > Installed Buster (netinstall CD, LXDE desktop ONLY, system-utils) in
> > Virtualbox 6.0 on Stretch (sysvinit as init) host to test and evaluate.
> > Firefox-esr, of course, installed by default, but after installing
> > Google Chrome didn't need it anymore, so . . . When I apt purge
> > firefox-esr, it was removed and epiphany-browser was installed its
> > place. ??? Strange. Never had that happen before. When I purged or
> > removed epiphany-browser, firefox-esr was reinstalled in ITS place.
> >
> > If I PINned both not to install, a lot of other files were installed
> > instead like verious ruby files, zip, vlc, etc. etc. List is way too
> > long to post here.
> >
> > Never, ever had this happen and I purged firefox-esr this way from both
> > Wheezy and Stretch. It purged as it should have been with nothing
> > added.
> >
> > Anyone got any ideas why this happened? Or is this a nasty, ol' bug?
>
> The package firefox-esr has:
>
> Provides: gnome-www-browser, www-browser
>
> which are "virtual packages" used in dependencies of other package to
> express they need a functionality, but don't care about the specific
> implementation.
>
> Most likely something in your system depends on one or both virtual
> packages, so apt is installing another package providing the virtual
> package to satisfy the dependency.
>
> The alternative would be to remove large portions of your system.
It was LibreOffice-help-en-us that was causing the problem due to
specifically listed browser dependencies. I purged the Help component
to test, and was able to remove both browsers with no problems.
Thanks for your input.
B
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