Bug#729526: ssh.deb: somewhat misleading description
Control: reassign -1 aptitude
Control: retitle -1 smarter markauto behaviour when removing transitional packages
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 11:28:42AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Regid Ichira <regid23@nt1.in> writes:
> > Indeed I had to unmarkauto first. My point is that my understanding of
> > the description is that I could remove the ssh package without
> > unmarkauto. Which is why I think the description should be modified.
> > Am I the only one who might understand the description this way?
>
> You're probably not the only one. However, the wording is also very
> standard for these sorts of transitional packages and is used in dozens,
> possibly hundreds, of other packages in Debian, so you'll probably run
> into it elsewhere as well. And the statement in the description is true
> from the perspective of Debian's core package management (dpkg and
> friends). The behavior that you ran into is an added feature of aptitude
> that's layered on top.
>
> The correct fix is for aptitude to be smart enough to not remove the
> dependencies of a transitional package that's marked as obsolete, and then
> people can just delete these packages and the right thing will happen. I
> thought I heard some rumblings about that support being added to aptitude,
> but I'm not sure what happened to that.
>
> (I should note that I'm not one of the ssh package maintainers, so this is
> just third-party commentary.)
I quite agree. I don't think it makes sense to add this kind of
specific commentary to the description of every transitional package
when essentially the same kind of problem applies to all of them. If
something is to change here, it'd be better to change it centrally in
the bits of the package management system that are being smart about
removals (excessively so in this case).
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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