On Saturday 21 February 2009 20:34:09 Michael M. Moore wrote:
Maybe there is no "magic package" that is keeping these things installed
and I just need to selectively remove them one-by-one, along with the
packages that will break but that I don't want anymore. I just thought
I might be missing something obvious about the best way to take care of
getting rid of a bunch of automatically installed packages relatively
quickly.
Any advice?
I can't answer the "why" question, but I use "apt-get autoremove"
and deborphan to prune the installed package list. Deborphan
has to be installed first, and if you're very brave, you do:
apt-get remove --purge `deborphan`
... repeatedly until it "converges", i.e. runs out of
packages to remove.