Re: apt-get

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 10:50:06AM -0600, Warren Turkal <wt@atmos.colostate.edu> was heard to say:
> On Friday 18 May 2007 08:03, Howard Young wrote:
> > Thank you for this link. I have read the information but it seems not to
> > have a specific option for what I want.
> 
> If you use aptitude for everything, it will keep track of packages that are 
> automatically installed when a specific package is installed. For instance, 
> if I install a package that pulls in libpq4, I can remove that package and 
> aptitude will remove the libpg4 assuming I haven't installed anything else 
> that depends on it. I believe this functionality would address what you want. 
> The key is that you have to use aptitude for all package 
> installation/uninstallation tasks.

  This is not true for suggested packages.  Aptitude had a flag to install
suggested packages, but I removed it because turning it on was almost
always useless.

  You can enable Keep-Suggests and manually set the suggested packages to
automatic mode, but this will hold *all* suggestions on the system,
effectively disabling the auto-removal feature (since the suggests graph
is very dense -- if you follow suggests, a large fraction of the package
database will be installed/kept on the system).

  There is presently no mechanism in aptitude for tagging particular
dependencies, and this is not a trivial problem (because you need to
"follow" the dependency as the cache changes under you; guess wrong and
you'll remove software the user still wants!)

  Daniel