Re: how to find why packages are automatically installed?
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:
> 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.
I'm pretty sure I know what happened, more or less. I started off by
marking gnome-desktop-environment for removal. That in and of itself
would have removed, most likely, almost everything I wanted to remove.
However, I wanted to keep gdm, so I marked that for installation
(that is, gdm was going to be removed, and I told aptitude not to
remove it.) That seems to have been enough to cause aptitude to keep
a bunch of other things I didn't want to keep, because of the
extensive network of depends/recommends. There were packages already
(automatically) installed that were recommended by gdm, like
gnome-session, even though gdm didn't require them and even though my
system would have been fine without them, but because there were
already installed, aptitude didn't remove them. And some of those
packages had recommends that were not removed, for the same reason.
Sort of a cascading effect.
What I should have done was let aptitude remove gdm, then reinstalled
gdm. That, in the end, is what I did, I just didn't know I should've
done that in the first place because aptitude's behavior wasn't what I
expected. But it is behavior that makes perfect sense, because as you
say, aptitude can't guess which automatically installed packages one
doesn't want anymore, when those automatically installed packages are
recommended by something one is keeping. The alternative would be to
make aptitude more aggressive about removing automatically installed
packages that aren't absolutely required by something being held, and
that would probably create more severe problems for users. I'd rather
have a few unnecessary packages sticking around that aren't doing any
harm and that I can always remove when I get around to it, than find I
had inadvertently let aptitude wipe out half my system.
It's just that, in this case, I actually wanted aptitude to wipe half
my system, and I didn't realize I was preventing that by marking a key
package as a keeper.
Michael M.
--
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within
limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add
'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's
will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
--Thomas Jefferson
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