On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 11:46:03 +0000, Chris Lale wrote:
Florian Kulzer wrote:
[...]
1) Aptitude remembers intended actions, even if you change the package
states and/or configuration settings which prompted this behavior.
When in doubt, run "aptitude keep-all".
2) Aptitude tries to react immediately to changes in package states,
including the "automatically installed" flag. If you want to run
several successive (un)markauto commands to change/fix your system
then you have to use "--schedule-only" to keep aptitude from doing
something unintended halfway through the operation and "keep-all"
afterwards. Another helpful stop-gap measure in such cases is
-o aptitude::Keep-Unused-Pattern='~T'
[...]
Looking at point 2 again, I am not sure why you have to run "aptitude
keep-all" at the end. "keep-all" removes the "A" (automatically
installed) flags, but you have already removed them with "aptitude
unmarkauto --schedule-only '~i'". Any "A" flags that you set with
"markauto" are removed by "keep-all", so your work is undone. What am I
missing?
I was not necessarily supposing that the user had done "aptitude
unmarkauto --schedule-only '~i'". I simply cannot be sure that there
will never be any scheduled actions after whatever complex sequence of
mark/unmark commands a given user might want to run. Since so many
people seem to be a bit freaked out by the behavior of aptitude I wanted
to be on the safe side. "keep-all" never hurts[*] and it helps in many
cases, so why not just run it once more in the end? (Considering
carefully if it is really necessary in each specific case takes much
longer than just running the command.)
Maybe it is better to rewrite that part of point 2 as:
If you want to be on the safe side you can always run "aptitude install
-fsD" to check if any of your previous commands has caused aptitude to
schedule unwanted actions. If that should turn out to be the case then
you can run "aptitude keep-all" (again) to revoke all scheduled actions.
[*] Actually keep-all can do "damage" because it will also remove all
your carefully placed "hold" and "forbid-version" specifications.
However, anyone who uses those to fine-tune aptitude's behavior is
probably not the target audience of this discussion.