On 7/25/2012 7:53 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
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.
Yes, it was a forest of dependency trees. But that does not nullify my point.
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.
Of course I canceled the operation. However, this was not a production system, and I was lazy, I had no huge investment in the setup, so I wiped clean and reinstalled, instead, upgrading to testing in the process.
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
Thank you for taking the time to give me this advice and help. What I do as a policy since is keep things tidy and not install unnecessary packages. I have used deborphan, but it is not perfect, so fortunately, it isn't very often needed.
The Debian relationship is a love/hate relationship.I still think that kind of purge shouldn't be possible. a more granular approach would be appreciated.
Mark