Re: What happens when Woody becomes Stable ??
Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com> writes:
> 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.
Using a contrived example:
Suppose you wanted to install galeon, which depends on
mozilla-browser. So, you did an 'apt-get install galeon', which installs
mozilla-browser as well. Then you try galeon for a while, and also
check out mozilla. You end up preferring mozilla, and use that as
your regular browser. After a while, you 'apt-get remove galeon'
since you no longer use it. However, according to your scheme,
mozilla, which you wanted to keep, also gets removed.
It gets even trickier if you consider using dselect, since it's
awfully hard to decide on whether a package was installed only because
dselect asked, or because the user agreed with dselect's choices
(ie. really wanted to keep those packages installed).
That's why it's really only useful to act as deborphan does, and only
choose to remove libs that no longer are depended upon. Even that
isn't foolproof, however.
--
Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>
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