Op vr 03-10-2003, om 04:59 schreef Daniel Burrows: > > Figuring out how to tell aptitude not to automatically delete "unused" packages > > required reading the User Manual while knowing that this was an issue. > > > > This is on by default, and the information about marking a package > > "manually selected" or not does not immediately spring to mind as having > > anything to do with whether a package is "unused" or not. > > > > Perhaps if it said "Remove unused automatically-installed packages > > automatically" ? ;-) > > In most cases, the garbage collection should operate without you > needing to know about it. (the increasing prevalence of meta-packages > is making this a bit tricky -- some explicit marking of these beasts in > the package tags might be nice) The way this garbage collection is implemented is one of the main dislikes I have about aptitude. Aptitude contains a database with packages that have been installed through aptitude; as such, it contains no information on packages that were installed through a different dpkg-frontend. Which is no problem in itself, except that aptitude assumes a package which has not been installed through aptitude is not wanted; this makes a transition from a different dpkg-frontend to aptitude cumbersome, to say the least. I much prefer the way debfoster handles this problem; instead of trying to find out automatically, based on actions that happened in the past, whether a package is wanted, debfoster plainly asks the user whether a package on which no other package depends, and that is not yet in its database, is wanted or not. This requires a lot of input for someone running debfoster for the first time on a system with already a lot of packages installed, but since it does not try to be 'smart', it does give me the feeling of having control, which wasn't the case when I last tried aptitude after having installed some hundreds of packages already. Of course, I must add that I only tried aptitude a few times; when I saw it suddenly uninstalling packages I use a lot, I kicked it off of my hard disk :-) -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "Stop breathing down my neck." "My breathing is merely a simulation." "So is my neck, stop it anyway!" -- Voyager's EMH versus the Prometheus' EMH, stardate 51462.
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