Re: What happens when Woody becomes Stable ??
Brian Nelson wrote:
> Mark Carroll <mark@chaos.x-philes.com> writes:
>
> > Mind you, one thing I wish would happen is that the system would offer
> > to deselect things that were only selected because of a dependency of
> > something you just deselected.
>
> That's a tricky task for the system to handle because it can't read
> your mind. There are tools like deborphan which find libs (or
> anything else) that are no longer depended on.
Deborphan isn't bad, but there's really no rocket science or mind
reading involved in getting apt to do what Mark wants. All that is
required is that when a package is automatically installed because of a
dependency, apt should set a flag in that package's entry in the package
database. At some later time, when the package was no longer required,
the flag would cause apt to automatically remove it. There could further
be a user-configuration option to prompt before automatically removing
such packages.
Testing all the installed packages to see which ones should be
automatically removed might be a little time-consuming, so this
functionality might be separate from "apt-get update" -- perhaps a new
command such as "apt-get houseclean" would be appropriate.
Craig
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