Re: How to remove automatically installed packages when nothing depends on them?

[Aneurin Price <aneurin.price@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 05:06:54PM +0100, Michael Wagner <michaeldebian@web.de> was heard to say:
>> * Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> 28.01.2009
>> > On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 08:27:13PM +0100, Michael Wagner <michaeldebian@web.de> was heard to say:
>>
>> > > aptitude --purge-unused purge xfce4-terminal
>> > >
>> > > It's documented in the man page of aptitude.
>> >
>> >   All that does is cause programs which are already being removed
>> > because they're unused to also be purged.  It won't help if they
>> > aren't being removed in the first place.
>>
>> From "man aptitude"
>>
>> --purge-unused
>>          Purge packages that are no longer required by any installed
>> package. This is equivalent to passing "-o Aptitude::Purge-Unused=true"
>> as a command-line argument.
>>
>> English is not my first language and I understand the above that it
>> removes packages which are no more required. And this is what the OP
>> wants.
>
>  The subtext of that statement is the assumption that you are aware
> that aptitude always *removes* packages which are not required (unless
> you have disabled that).  Since you're the second person to make this
> mistake, I probably need to fix that text in the manpage.
>

I've never noticed that option before, and it sounds *very nearly* like
exactly what I want. Is there a way to say that unneeded dependencies
should always be purged if I'm purging the package I'm manually
removing, but just removed as normal otherwise? Couldn't find anything
like that in the manpage at least.

Thanks,
Nye