Re: Automatically purging non-official packages
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 05:16:52 -0400, Tom H wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 5:38 PM, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (...)
>
>>>> In my limited experience of "purge-ppa", it's worked very well.
>>>
>>> My guess is that is highly dependant on user's configuration: the
>>> lesser repositories available + basic pinning rules = the higher
>>> chances for getting successful results.
>>
>> That applies to non-Debian repositories but not to PPAs that's probably
>> why Ubunical created "apt-add-repository" with which you can add any
>> repository including PPAs and VirtualBox to "/etc/apt/sources.d/" along
>> with its corresponding gpg key but limited itself to "ppa-purge" rather
>> than increasing the complexity of its removal script with
>> "apt-purge-repository" (which is what the OP wants to do).
>
> I don't know how Ubuntu works in this regard (I mean, what are the inners
> of their PPA infrastructure) but speaking for Debian and I don't like the
> idea of letting a script to remove/downgrade packages/libraries and make
> "its best guesses" on how to proceed.
>
> Although on systems running the stable branch can be less traumatic
> because dependencies there are more contained, I'm still very hesitant of
> using such a tool unless it's to be run on a system for testing purposes.
If Debian had PPAs, I'd be happy to use ppa-purge. You might hit bugs,
like an earlier poster has, but every app has bugs. Although it isn't
a bug in apt-get/aptitude's case, they both try to remove a big chunk
of the installed packages if, for example, you ask them to remove
something that GNOME considers essential. Unlike ppa-purge, they both
warn you about what they're about to do.
PPAs aren't meant for production boxes - certainly not for servers (I
even wonder whether there's anything in them that's X-less) although
there are probably many Ubuntu users who use them on their main
desktop/laptop - because PPAs are used to install packages that aren't
in the official repositories.
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