On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 09:53:59PM +0100, Nelson Menezes wrote:
Jo Shields wrote:
Alexander Kostadinov wrote:
I follow instructions to install xen and when I write
aptitude remove exim4 exim4-base lpr nfs-common portmap pidentd
pcmcia-cs pppoe pppoeconf ppp pppconfig
It wants to remove 501MB of packages most of which it says are unused
and one of them is udev...
I think this is weird.
Any opinions?
aptitude has integrated orphan management, to allow for cleaner system
management. For example, if you "aptitude install kde", then when you
"aptitude purge kde", it will remove all the dependancies that came in
automatically (whereas apt-get would only remove the kde metapackage,
and leave the other few hundred meg of packages). Additionally, if you
"aptitude purge" some dependant package such as kcalc, then the kde
metapackage is removed (as the dependancy is no longer satisfied), and
because "kde" is removed, so are all the other dependancies pulled in by
that metapackage.
Your problem is going to be that some package you removed either depends
on udev (and is therefore the cause of udev's installation), or is
depended on by something that depends on udev (therefore the dependant
package is removed, along with its dependancies).
There's a mantra to mark all current packages as manual (i.e. don't
automatically remove them), but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
You can also tell aptitude to keep your currently-installed packages by
pressing "=" at the top levels of the tree.
Wouldn't you want to mark them '+'? '=' would keep them from ever being
upgraded themselves.
-- hendrik