Re: Is this really the right thing to do?

[Helge Hafting <helge.hafting@daldata.no>]

> >Programs that are useful by itself could install with a counter that's
> >already 1 higher. For example: if all the packages that depend on Xterm are
> >removed, the counter of Xterm is still not zero. So it would not be
> deleted.
> >Thinking a bit longer: in this way almost no programs reach zero.
> 
> 
> Then, they'd have to start with a counter of 1 only when they were selected
> by the user, and a counter of 0 when dselect selected to enforce a
> dependency.

And the clueless would still start shouting "I removed XXX and then
YYY disappeared too!!! Without warning!!! This sucks!!!"

This would happen because he install XXX which depends on YYY, so YYY
gets auto-installed.  Then the user finds YYY very useful, get tired of XXX
and toss it.  

Maybe they could get a question like "do you want to get rid of YYY
too?  It was installed only for supporting XXX but may be useful
on its own."  That, or let them clean up manually the way we do
today.  Auto-removal should apply only to stuff that can't work alone,
such as libraries.  Even libraries are dangerous as the user may
have written his own unpackaged program using some library.

Helge Hafting