Re: how to find why packages are automatically installed?
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 09:54:00AM -0800, "Michael M. Moore" <michael@writemoore.net> was heard to say:
>>> The thing is I was planning on keeping gdm, though I guess I could
>>> switch to xdm, or do without a display manager. But gdm, according
>>> to aptitude, shouldn't require nautilus. It shouldn't even require
>>> gnome-session, just one of gnome-session | x-session-manager |
>>> x-window-manager | x-terminal-emulator. I have Openbox and xterm
>>> installed, so I should be covered there, right?
>>
>> Then you need to remove gnome-session and replace it with something
>> else.
>
> That gets to the heart of my confusion about how this works, because I
> didn't *need* a replacement for gnome-session -- I already had packages
> installed that satisfied that requirement.
aptitude conservatively assumes that if A depends on B, that you might
want B because of A. That's true even if the same dependency could be
satisfied by another package -- otherwise aptitude would be in the
business of guessing which alternative not to delete. :-)
> But aptitude wouldn't
> automatically remove the automatically installed gnome-session unless I
> removed gdm. I could have manually removed gnome-session without
> breaking anything, but all that would have done was remove gnome-session
> -- that action would not have removed nautilus, even though nautilus was
> still installed because gnome-session recommended it.
I'm not sure, but I bet that there was something else installed that
needed nautilus, and that gdm depended on or recommended. I can't see
any obvious candidates in that list, though. (I tried a few, and they
all only require gnome-session)
Daniel
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