Re: apt-get doesn't upgrade, but synaptic does

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2014-04-13 05:59 +0200, Patrick Bartek wrote:

> On Sat, 12 Apr 2014, Brad Rogers wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 11 Apr 2014 18:28:04 -0700
>> Patrick Bartek <bartek047@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Patrick,
>> 
>> >uninstall or purge libreoffice from the system. 'apt-get purge
>> >libreoffice' won't do it.  I've done tests, and as far as I can tell
>> >little or nothing is removed. 
>> 
>> Not even the meta-package 'libreoffice'?
>
> I rechecked, and the metapackage is removed, but not any of libreoffice
> modules.

In the past, removing a metapackage caused its dependencies to be
autoremoved as well, and people complained about that apt wanted to
remove half their system as soon as they decided to uninstall a
dependency of the gnome metapackage.  Therefore, apt's behavior wrt
metapackages was changed to _not_ mark their dependencies as
automatically installed. 

> Ultimately, I just purged each of the modules by name, then
> autoremove the orphaned dependencies.
>
> There should be an easier way.

You could use aptitude to mark the dependencies as auto-installed
(untested):

# aptitude markauto "~Dlibreoffice"

Then you can autoremove them as you wish.

Cheers,
       Sven