Re: aptitude --mind-your-own-business option?
On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 21:04:00 +0000, s. keeling wrote:
> Florian Kulzer:
>
> [very entertaining discussion snipped]
>
> > the "automatically remove unused packages" option. When in doubt, run
> > "aptitude install -sf", check what it wants to do and smack it over the
> > head with "keep-all" if you do not like what you see.
>
> (0) heretic /home/keeling_ aptitude install -sf
> [snip]
> The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
> xmms
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
> afio bogofilter gkrellmms gkrellweather irssi-text kernel-package
> libcanlock2 libgsl0 most ntp ntp-server ntp-simple rxvt slrn zsh
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 16 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 24.5MB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
> Abort.
>
> Some of those are my favourite programs.
>
> [BTW, I haven't done any keep-all's or anything here. I'm just trying
> to learn from the discussion.]
One problem is that aptitude seems to consider xmms as automatically
installed and wants to remove it because no other package depends on it.
You either inadvertently marked it as "auto" during earlier experiments
with aptitude or aptitude misinterprets something that you did to your
system with another packages manager between two aptitude runs. In any
case it should be fixable by "aptitude --schedule-only unmarkauto xmms".
The rest of the removals look like intended actions that aptitude
remembers from earlier invocations. These actions are probably also the
result of misunderstandings due to mixing of package managers, but that
does not matter to aptitude. (The package description refers to this as
"dselect-like persistence of user actions".) I think that aptitude will
only forget about these actions if you run "aptitude keep-all" or select
"Cancel pending actions" in interactive mode. (In your example it might
also still remember that it once wanted to remove xmms, even after you
delete the "auto" mark.)
To keep things entertaining, I just tried "aptitude --schedule-only
markauto kde". Now aptitude wants to remove 197 packages from my system:
the "unused" KDE metapackage and most of its dependencies which were
(correctly) marked "auto" back when I installed KDE. (If I do not use
--schedule-only then aptitude wants to get to work right away and I have
to cancel the markauto command if I want to keep KDE on my system.) Even
after I run "aptitude --schedule-only unmarkauto kde" to revert to the
old state of affairs, I still get the 197 packages listed for removal if
I run "aptitude --install sf". Only "aptitude keep-all" restores sane
behavior.
--
Regards,
Florian
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