[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Annoyances of aptitude (Was: Where are we now?) (Was: Bits from the RM)



On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 06:34:29PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be> was heard to say:
> Op vr 03-10-2003, om 04:59 schreef Daniel Burrows:
> >   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)

  Incidentally, the problem I was referring to here is:

  (a) user installs kde
  (b) kdemultimedia (chosen for, ummm, no particular reason :P ) has a bug
      which makes kde uninstallable
  (c) aptitude sees a dependency problem and wants to remove kde
  (d) all of KDE is removed.

  It might be that the real solution here is "don't be so aggressive
about removing packages to solve dependency conflicts".

> 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.

  This behavior is obviously terrible, which is why aptitude doesn't
try to implement it.  Of course, as ccheney pointed out recently, there
are always bugs.  Can you show me a case where, starting with no
aptitude state information, you run aptitude and get any package on
the system marked as "automatically installed"?  (one exception is stuff
that really is automatically installed in order to perform the
upgrade-on-start)

  I just tested this on my computer and it behaves as I expect.  I
wonder if you somehow accidentally marked everything as automatic the
first time you used aptitude (or used a buggy version, although I don't
remember any released version with this particular bug), then saved
those states and forgot about it?

  Daniel

-- 
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
|                If we do not change our direction                            |
|                we are likely to end up where we are headed.                 |
\------- (if (not (understand-this)) (go-to http://www.schemers.org)) --------/



Reply to: