Mark Allums wrote:
cortman wrote:
Is this a bug?
No, it's dependency hell.
No. Dependency Hell[1] would require a rigidity of dependencies that
are difficult to resolve. These resolve fine. And as is they are not
causing any problems. It is just suggesting that if you don't want
gnome installed then it would, if you told it to do so, remove the
"lint" associated with it.
In this way it is a feature of dpkg. You install foo. Installing foo
pulls in foo-common and foo-data. You remove foo. That would leave
foo-common and foo-data behind. But this feature allows you to clean
those up easily. That's good.
When used for a very large metapackage such as gnome which is used to
pull in a large amount of the rest of the system then dpkg won't know
if that means it should keep the dependencies or not. Obviously a
human is smart enough to know how to handle it but coding artificial
intelligence has a long history of being hard to get right.
I go through and mark the high level packages as manually installed by
running the install command again. Since they are already installed
it won't do anything but mark them as being wanted. For example:
apt-get install libreoffice
And after every marking look again and repeat with another high level
package until the list is trimmed. I avoid marking 'lib*' packages
since those are usually better left automatic. You can tell the
difference by the names. And along the way you might find that you
really do want to remove some of the lint which you never use.
Bob
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell