Bug#939813: tasksel: selected packages marked for removal on apt full-upgrade
Package: tasksel
Version: 3.53
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks unrelated software
Dear Maintainer,
The real packages that are installed from the metapackages that tasksel uses
will be marked for automatic removal after the next full system upgrade because
neither the metapackages nor the real packages are marked as being manually
installed to apt, and the metapackages are not listed as dependent packages of
tasksel, which is the only one of these packages that is marked as being
manually installed.
After upgrading from Debian 9.9 to 10.1, I had over 300 packages marked to be
automatically removed. Looking through the list, some of them were what I would
consider as "core" packages to my desktop computing environment, packages like
LibreOffice, Firefox, and XFCE. I used 'apt install' to both mark some of these
packages as being manually installed and to ensure that I was not missing any
new, dependent packages. The problem was, I missed that the network-manager
package was also marked as automatically installed and set to be removed, so
after my next 'apt autoremove' and system reboot, my system had no network
connection and was missing a lot of the packages necessary to create one.
Luckily, I still had a Debian 9.5 installation thumb drive lying around and
was able to boot that into rescue mode and inject the network-manager package
into my root filesystem. However, actions such as this or knowing to scrutinize
the list of packages marked for automatic removal are not behaviors that should
be expected of normal users. The list of packages that automatically will be
removed should not break the system or remove core functionality.
If possible, probably the easiest fix would be to ensure that packages tasksel
marks for installation are also marked as being manually installed to apt.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.1
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/6 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages tasksel depends on:
ii apt 1.8.2
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.71
ii liblocale-gettext-perl 1.07-3+b4
ii perl-base 5.28.1-6
ii tasksel-data 3.53
tasksel recommends no packages.
tasksel suggests no packages.
-- debconf information:
tasksel/title:
tasksel/first: desktop, xfce-desktop, print-server, standard
* tasksel/desktop: xfce
tasksel/tasks:
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