Re: aptitude vs. debfoster

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

T <mlist4suntong@yahoo.com> writes:
> This is unacceptably to me. These packages should be automatically purged
> as well. Or I'm doing something wrong?

You're probably doing something wrong.

One possibility that comes to mind is that you've _already_ got those
packages installed, having using some other program than aptitude to
install them -- if that's the case, then aptitude won't know that those
various libraries are "only dependencies" because it never had a chance
to record that information.  Aptitude is conservative, and assumes that
any package it doesn't _know_ is automatically installed might have been
installed intentionally by the user, and so shouldn't be automatically
removed.

So basically, the first time you start using aptitude, you have to give
aptitude that information, by marking as "automatically installed" all
packages that you later want to be automatically deinstalled.  After
that, as long as you use aptitude to install new stuff, it will do do
the appropriate marking for you.

[This step is actually pretty easy because you can use aptitude's
powerful search and limiting commands to handle most of the common cases
-- e.g.: limit to only non-development libraries with the search pattern
(^lib)!(-dev$), and mark them all as "autoinstalled" (with one
keystroke); limit to all packages with names matching (-base|-common),
mark them; etc.]

-Miles
-- 
`Cars give people wonderful freedom and increase their opportunities.
 But they also destroy the environment, to an extent so drastic that
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