Mark Allums wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > > Mark Allums wrote: > > > 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. > > Well, okay. But being require to manually mark 100+ packages in > order to remove one seems needlessly tedious. Debian is a harsh > mistress. What would you suggest as an alternative and how would it be implemented? And I think you are exagerating it quite a bit saying hundred plus packages to mark individually. It is probably only a half dozen to a dozen when you get right down to it. All of those "lib*" packages make it look like a lot but if you look at the dependency tree behind libreoffice and a handful of others you will see that they are all covered with those large brushes. I personally would rather the gnome meta-packages weren't so all encompassing. In particular I am in the camp that thinks network-manager should not be a dependency. But that is a whole different 200+ message thread of discussion that has happened many times both on debian-user and debian-devel so please let's not hit that tired topic here. Suffice to say that something smaller would be nice. I would prefer having more smaller bundles that could be installed piecemeal. However the upstream gnome developers don't feel the same way. They would like to see a 100% gnome system top to bottom and think doing anything else is wrong according to their philosophy. We will have to agree to disagree. For me if there were a set of meta-packages such as "desktop-extras" or some such that would be my preference over having a huge "gnome" meta-package. > I would wish that those meta-packages weren't so inclusive. Inclusive? Or exclusive? For me it is any rigid inflexibility that causes problems. Depends with flexible versions are okay for me. Proper use of Recommends and Suggests is best. > I recall an incident where I wanted to remove some cruft > (can't recall, but it was something silly, like AMOR) and apt wanted > to remove 3/4 of the packages on my system, over 700 packages. Next time you hit a case like that it would be great if you would bring up the exact example for discussion. Because I don't think it was doing what you are thinking it was doing. For example let's say you don't use and don't want 'abiword' installed on your system. You go to remove it. But the gnome package depends upon abiword. That puts you into exactly the same situation as the original poster. The 'abiword' package could be removed. That would force removal of 'gnome', which is okay since it is just a meta-package and you don't need it. But then dpkg will announce that the long list of things marked as automatically installed by gnome are now candidates for removal exactly as we are discussing here. It won't actually remove them unless you tell it to do so. It just prints the scary message listing them as candidates for an "autoremove". As discussed they can be marked as manual and kept just fine. > Granted, a lot of that was stuff I installed on a > workstation/desktop of mine just to play with, or for no sane > reason. That was why I was removing things. Still, it seemed very > drastic at the time, and still does. The only situation I can think of (and probably to be corrected five minutes after posting by someone more astute) would be if you tried to remove a lower level library. Everything above it in the dependency tree that depends upon it will be removed because they would be broken without it. But that is just as it should be. On the topic of actually wanting to remove a lot of packages... Personally a tool that I like to use to clean the lint on my system is 'deborphan'. Sometimes with 'orphaner'. But mostly just manually with 'deborphan' and then if I like it with 'apt-get purge $(deborphan)' repeating as needed until everything has been removed that I want removed. Bob
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