Re: how to find why packages are automatically installed?

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:42:36PM +0000, Aneurin Price <aneurin.price@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:28:38PM +0000, Aneurin Price <aneurin.price@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> >> To expand upon this, I believe the OP's situation is some behaviour I've
> >> also seen, which seemed odd until I thought about it and couldn't actually
> >> come up with a better way:
> >
> >  I'm pretty sure this is different -- I was talking about the
> > situation of "A Depends: B | C".  People sometimes think that if both
> > B and C are installed, aptitude should guess which one they don't want
> > and remove it.
> >
> 
> Hmm, what happens in the case that exactly one of B or C is marked auto?

  Same thing.

> >  The setting is Aptitude::Keep-Recommends.  But in fact, this isn't
> > enabled by default, although passing --without-recommends on the
> > command-line enables it automatically for exactly the reason you pointed
> > out.
> >
> 
> I read that as saying that setting the option from the preferences menu,
> rather than the command-line, will *not* automatically enable
> Aptitude::Keep-Recommends. Is that correct?

  Yep, that's right.  The command-line option sets two preferences at
once (because the alternative is surprising and usually not what you
want).

  Daniel