Steve Greenland wrote: > You might consider including a default filter so that the only > candidates for automatic removal begin with 'lib' and don't end with > '-dev'. This seems rather silly. The whole point of this feature is to distinguish those packages that you manually requested from those that were installed solely because of Depends, Recommends, or Suggests in another package. The idea here, rather obviously, is that if I install package A, then remove it, I should have my system pretty much back to the state it was in before I installed A (modulo any conffiles that may be left behind, since aptitude doesn't purge auto-removed packages, just removes them). This isn't true with dselect because everything that A depends on that I didn't already have is left behind. Aptitude fixes this problem in a general way that applies to all types of packages. Limiting it to lib packages, and/or excluding -dev packages, makes the fix less generally effective. Specific examples that would be broken by your suggestion: - debian-goodes, wmget, and a handful of other packages depend on curl. If they are all removed, and the auto-remove flag is set on curl (indicating that you don't want curl for itself, but only because the other packages use it), then curl should also be removed. - kde-devel depends on several other packages, some of which don't begin with lib, others of which are lib-*dev. Again, if these packages were only installed because of kde-devel, they should be removed when kde-devel is removed. Clear the auto-remove flag if you want to keep them. Note also that aptitude will always show you what it's going to do before it does it, so it's trivial to hit '+' on packages that are about to be auto-removed if you want to keep them. Craig
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