Re: cleanly getting rid of manually installed transitional packages due to rename

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2020-04-21 17:07 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> Sometimes packages get renamed. A renamed package becomes a
> "transitional package", which can be tracked by deborphan and
> can safely removed if it no longer has any reverse dependencies.
>
> The issue is that if this was a manually installed package,
> typically with no past dependencies on it (i.e. no dependencies
> that were updated from the old package to the new one), and if one
> wants to remove it, then apt or aptitude will also want to remove
> the new package because this new package has not been installed
> manually and its only reverse dependency (the transitional package)
> has just been removed by this operation. Note: as shown below, with
> apt, this is proposed via "apt autoremove", and with aptitude, this
> is automatically proposed at the same time.
>
> Is there a way to avoid this behavior automatically, i.e. by
> forwarding the "manually installed" state automatically to the
> new package? Shouldn't this be done by default?

It is done (at least by apt, not so sure about aptitude) if the
transitional package is moved to the oldlibs section.  Unfortunately,
the section of packages is determined by the FTP masters' override file
and is usually only changed months after the initial upload.

So if you run stable, this will likely work in most cases when you
upgrade from Debian N To Debian N+1.  If you use testing or unstable,
you are out of luck. :-(

Cheers,
       Sven