Re: Annoyances of aptitude

[Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org>]

Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be> wrote:
> 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)

> 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.
[...]

An alternative but safer way would be to record which packages were
installed with aptitude only to fulfill a dependency and mark them as
unwanted.
              cu andreas