Re: aptitude keeps trying to replace my vim-gtk and ftpd

[Jules Dubois <3f88o9g02@sneakemail.com>]

On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 14:35:49 -0500, Wayne Topa wrote:

> Jules Dubois(3f88o9g02@sneakemail.com) is reported to have said:
>> On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:54:56 -0500, Wayne Topa wrote:
>> 
>> If you want to keep bluefish, tell aptitude you installed it
>> "manually".
>> 
>  I didn't install it manually.

I should have been more specific.

When aptitude installs something "automatically", for example a support
library or the components of a big application set such as GNOME, it
does so because some other package you installed depended on it.  If you
later remove that other package, you don't have any further need for the
automatically installed package(s) because you didn't specifically ask for
it (them) in the first place.  Then, aptitude will remove it (them) for
you.

You said you didn't install bluefish manually, and that's certainly what
aptitude thinks.  Since nothing depends on it, aptitude is going to remove
it.

Now, what I meant was 'tell aptitude you installed it "manually"'.  It
doesn't matter whether you did this (or not).  When you tell aptitude you
installed bluefish manually, it won't try to remove it simply because 
nothing depends on it.

> Well it struck me a bit odd that I had bluefish runing an edit of my web
> page and aptitude was somehow informed that it wasn't being used.

This is only a reference to dependencies.  Aptitude can't know what you
want or use, only that no other manually installed package -- i.e.,
package specifically requested for installation -- uses it.  Just tell
it you want it, and you can change your mind later if you so choose.

> I think I'll just remove aptitude and keep doing the dselsct update ;
> apt-get dist-upgrade.

Everybody has their preferences.  I found some difficulties when I
switched from Synaptic to aptitude, because nothing but aptitude handles
this sort of installation dependency tracking.

I hope my explanation of aptitude's automatic removal of unused packages
helps you in your decision.  (You might see that I am a fan of aptitude
and one of its best features is the automatic removal of "unused" [sic]
packages.)