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

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 03-Oct-03, 10:49 (CDT), Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net> wrote: 
> 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.
[*snip*]
> 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.

Look, *I* understand the feature, and I leave it on with no filters, and
I always look at what apt is going to do before I tell it to do it.

But people in the thread have been complaining about being surprised
by it, and losing vital (in their environment) packages. My initial
response is "well, it's your own damn fault, didn't you look at the
preview screen?", but then I thought maybe a little more restrained use
of the feature might make them happier. But you're right, you can't
prevent careless people from being careless.

Either enable by default or disable by default, but no half measures.

Steve


-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net