Re: Network Manager cannot be removed
On 2009-08-31 06:27 +0200, JoeHill wrote:
> Sven Joachim wrote:
>>
>> I don't know anything about Synaptic (never used it), but there are
>> "apt-mark unmarkauto <packages>" and "aptitude unmarkauto <packages>"
>> which you can use at the commandline.
>
> Okay, so now I've removed the gnome metapackage, and aptitude keeps wanting to
> remove all of gnome. I looked at the explanations for unmarkauto, but I'm not
> sure how I would use that for all of the gnome packages. I mean, not all of
> them even have the word gnome in them, so what kind of wildcard argument could
> I use?
You only need to do it for the reverse dependencies of the gnome
metapackage; the magic command is
# aptitude unmarkauto "~R^gnome$"
The string in quotes is a search term, ~R stands for "reverse
dependency", and ^ and $ are the standard regexps for beginning and end
of the string (so that only the gnome package is matched, not other
foo-gnome-bar packages).
> Is there somewhere I could look for examples of how to use this command?
Well, the command is trivial; what is not so easy is the search pattern,
for which aptitude offers powerful, but non-obvious means. If you have
the user manual in the aptitude-doc-en package installed, you can find
it under file:///usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/ch02s03s05.html.
Sven
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