Re: How to remove subcomponents of KDE?

[Ryo Furue <furue@hawaii.edu>]

Hi,

| > | 1. Start aptitude.
| > | 2. Select the package "kde".
| > | 3. Navigate through it (press enter), and mark as _manually_
| > | installed (press lowercase "m"), all the packages you really
| > | want. That could be all the packages, except kde-amusements.
| >
| > Thanks.  I understand that this is the "proper" way to achive
| > my goal.  However, the problem is that I don't know which KDE
| > packages I want.  All I know is that I do NOT want kde-amusements.
| 
| So you actually do know which packages you want:  All of them that
| KDE installed for you except kde-amusements.

Yes.  Alejandro (Alex) already pointed that out: the "kde" package
directly depends on only 12 packages.  So, all I need to do is
to mark them all, except for kde-amusements, as
automatically-installed.

Here's a what happened.  First I marked them:

   # aptitude install 'kde-core&M' 'kdeaccessibility&M' \
       'kdeaddons&M' . . .

Then

   # aptitude remove kde

But, this removed only two packages, "kde" and "kde-amusements"!

My guess is that the packages that kde-amusements depends on were
marked as manually-installed for some reason.  So, I marked them
as automaticall-installed:

   # aptitude install 'kdeedu&M' 'kdegames&M' 'kdetoys&M'

But, no.   This removed only these metapackages.

So, I marked the packages that "kdeedu" depends on(*).  Then, voila,
those packages were finally removed.

After all, I ended up with manually removing all of the tens of the
packages under kde-amusements.

I don't know why this was the case.  My machine is quite old.
I started with Woody when that was "stable".  At one time,
I dist-upgraded to the "testing", which was Sarge then.
I've kept dist-upgraing since then.  (So, I'm using Etch now.)
I've been using "aptitude" only for less than a year.  Could that
be the reason why the packages weren't marked as
automatically-installed?

Anyway, thank you all for your help.
Ryo
----------------------------
(*)  I'm puzzled why '~Dkdeedu' doesn't match all kdeedu's
  dependencies.  If it did match all,

     # aptitude install '~Dkdeedu&M'

  would have been enough to mark all dependencies as
  automatically-installed.  The fact is that

     # aptitude search '~Dkdeedu&M'

  shows only kalzium, kde-amusements, kdeedu, khangman, klatin,
  kstars, ktouch, and libkdeedu-dev.  It doesn't show kwordquiz,
  for example.