Alexander Kostadinov wrote:
I follow instructions to install xen and when I writeaptitude 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.