Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)

[Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de>]

Am 2017-06-08 16:07, schrieb Johannes Schauer:
> Quoting Christian Seiler (2017-06-07 15:26:35)
> >   - You install package A, which Recommends: B, but you don't
> >     want B, notice that at the time, and either remove B
> >     afterwards, or install A with --no-install-recommends. But
> >     then you install package C at a later point in time, which
> >     actually depends on B. You notice that C is not what you
> >     wanted, purge it again, but apt-get autoremove will _not_
> >     remove B, even though it's automatically installed, because
> >     A recommends it.
> >
> >     So basically, the following command sequence may or may not
> >     leave your system in an identical state, depending on the
> >     packages that previously have been installed on your system:
> >
> >        apt-get install A
> >        apt-get purge A
> >        apt-get autoremove --purge
> >
> >     Unfortunately, I don't see a good solution to this problem,
> >     and I've thought about this a lot in the past.
>
> You may want to have a look at the following apt configuration setting:
>
> APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant "false";
>
> It controls whether "autoremove" also considers autoremoving packages 
> that are
> only pulled in because of a Recommends relationship.

Well, that doesn't really help in this case.

In my scenario, I do have Recommends installed by default, I just
may decide to not install some Recommends in some cases. In that
case, apt-get autoremove with the setting you suggested would
remove a _ton_ of packages I actually want to keep. Your setting
is only useful if you also disable installing Recommends by default.
In that case, yes, it would help.

Regards,
Christian