Re: aptitude --mind-your-own-business option?

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

On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 01:36:10 -0900, Ken Irving wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 11:17:10AM +0100, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > ... I can easily
> > configure/use aptitude such that the "installation" and "garbage
> > disposal" actions are carried out in separate steps, but I choose not to
> > do so. 
> 
> So...  That sounds pretty much what I was trying to find, a way to do
> the installation despite removals being pending.  How do you do this?
> 
> The only way I was able to figure out was to do the removals first, so
> they were no longer pending.

I think it should be possible to run "aptitude keep-all" followed by

aptitude -o aptitude::Keep-Unused-Pattern='~T' install <list of packages>

to achieve what you want.

You can also set the Keep-Unused-Pattern to '~T' permanently by editing
/root/.aptitude/config or by going to CTRL-T > Options > Dependency
handling > "Don't automatically remove unused packages matching this
filter" in interactive mode. Aptitude will then still keep track of
automatic installs but it will never remove unused packages on its own.
If you want to clean house in that configuration you can run

aptitude search '~M!~R~i'

to get a list of packages that aptitude considers "unused". If you like
what you see you can run

aptitude remove '~M!~R~i'

to get rid of the cruft.

-- 
Regards,
          Florian