Re: aptitude dist-upgrade removes important packages

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 17:27:27 +0100, Marko Randjelovic wrote:
> When I run "aptitude dist-upgrade", it says some packages will be removed:
> 
> The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
>  bug-buddy eog esound fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool
>  gconf-editor gdm gedit gedit-common gnome-backgrounds gnome-cards-data
>  gnome-core gnome-games gnome-games-data gnome-keyring-manager
>  gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils gnomemeeting
>  gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtkhtml3.8 gucharmap guile-1.6-libs
>  industrial-cursor-theme libavahi-compat-howl0 libdmx1 libgnomevfs2-bin
>  libgtkhtml3.8-15 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0
>  libguile-ltdl-1 libopenh323-1.18.0 libpt-1.10.0 libpt-plugins-alsa
>  libpt-plugins-v4l python-gnome2-desktop system-tools-backends vino zenity
>  zip
> 
> There is obviously something wrong because I use many of these packages. 
> It wants to remove whole gnome. If I use apt-get, 0 packages are to be 
> removed.
> 
> Is this some bug in aptitude?

Most likely it is not a bug. It seems that some packages have been
marked as "automatically installed" and no other package on your system
depends on them anymore. In that case aptitude will remove these
"unused" packages unless you change that configuration option. 

This should be fixable by running

aptitude unmarkauto '~M!~R~i'

to remove the "auto" mark from all the packages on which no other
installed package depends.

-- 
Regards,
          Florian