Re: switching from apt-get to aptitude

[Cameron Hutchison <camh@xdna.net>]

Grant Thomas wrote:

>Question for you (anyone) then:
>If you install kde through aptitude, an aptitude marks Xorg as a
>dependency, and then install gnome a couple of days later, would
>removing kde also remove Xorg, or would it see it as a current
>dependency for gnome and leave it?

Aptitude does not mark Xorg as a dependency - it already knows the
dependencies from the package information. What aptitude records is
whether a package was automatically installed as a dependency of
a package that it was asked to install.

When aptitude removes a package, it looks if there are any packages
marked as automatically installed that no other package depends on,
and if so it will remove them.

Aptitude will never remove a dependency if it is still needed by another
package (unless you force it), as that would leave your system in a
broken state.