Re: mixing aptitude and synaptic

[Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>]

OK, I have to jump in since there seems to be a lot of misinformation
going around.

Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk> writes:

> There is one snag. Aptitude keeps a note of packages that have been
> installed manually (as opposed to being installed automatically as
> dependencies). The result is that it assumes that any packages
> installed using Synaptic were not manually installed.
> Aptitude sometimes wants to remove a number of your packages because
> it assumes that they are no longer needed.

I think it is the other way round: that aptitude just remembers which
packages are automatically installed. You should therefore be able to
use synaptic or apt-get to install packages. aptitude won't remove
them. The only downside is that aptitude will not remove the
dependencies that these other packages have installed automatically.
See below.

I have a feeling that folks might have selected a new (or old) package
which caused dependency cascades to happen and blamed it on apt-get or
synaptic.

> The solution (thanks to
> Magnus Therning in a previous post) is to run
>
>    # aptitude unmarkauto --schedule-only '~i'
>
> before running Aptitude commands.

Wow, this pretty much just ruins one of the great features of
aptitude. After running this, aptitude will never remove dependencies
that are no longer needed.

What would be more useful is to run "aptitude markauto" on those
packages which apt-get and synaptic install automatically as
dependencies.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD
Maintainer of comp.mail.mh FAQ and MH-E. Vote Libertarian!
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