Theo Schmidt wrote: > Am Sonntag, 3. Juli 2005 02.04 schrieb Bob Proulx: > > I have a rather agressive method. > ... > > I then remove that list. WARNING! Don't do this unless you know what > > you are doing. > ... > > What is the preferred methode for those of us who don't really know > what they are doing? Here is why I gave the warning. I was --purging and that means /etc/ config files would be cleaned up. But if through the dependencies apt wanted to remove something else then that would also be purged. I look over the list of packages and go, yes I can do without all of those, first and then I know I won't be removing something important. But if you don't then you might and that could leave your system in a bad state. You don't have to --purge. That may leave packages around as 'r'emoved and configuration files might be hanging around. But you can find those later with 'dpkg -l | grep ^rc' and deal with them later. And really what are a few files left hanging around. Not using --purge would be safer because then if something important were removed by mistake it would be easy to install that again and all of the configuration would still exist and everything would recover okay. But really whenever one is removing packages there must be some type of warning applied. Because it may be possible to remove too much. It is a hard problem to automate and so you need to keep an eye on things. > New versions of KDE are a horror for me because at the very least > various small things have to be reconfigured or never work again and > at worst KDE no longer works at all and requires a lot of detective > work regarding dependencies. I use Debian testing with at present > KDE 3.3.2 and never have any problems with updates or installing new > software except with KDE things. When KDE upgrades in a major way from version to version things will be different. Sometimes that means that you need to reconfigure to meet those changes. This is not something that a package can do anything about. Most of the interesting configuration is in the user's home directory and can't be touched by the package. It is an upstream change and if taking the upstream upgrade that is all there is to it. Bob
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