Re: cleanly getting rid of manually installed transitional packages due to rename
On 2020-04-24 23:48:16 -0500, David Wright wrote:
> On Fri 24 Apr 2020 at 21:07:31 (+0200), Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>
> > Since you don't want to purge pdftk, why did you decide to purge it
> > above?
>
> Because in Real Life, pdftk is an empty transitional package.
> In your hypothetical example you said it wasn't.
Oops, a typo: s/not/now/. So my example should be, after replacing
"not" by "now" (and I hope "currently, this is like your example"
makes more sense now):
I think that you are over-optimistic. Imagine the following case.
The pdftk package has been manually installed in the past and is
now a transitional package to pdftk-java (currently, this is like
your example). But the system has some package that depends on
pdftk-java. So, when you run
apt-get -s purge pdftk
you won't have any message about pdftk-java. Later in the future,
the dependency on pdftk-java disappears, so that pdftk-java will
be proposed for autoremoval. But since this can occur a long time
after the removal of pdftk, you probably have forgotten that you
still need pdftk-java, even if you use it everyday. Well, for
this one, one can probably guess (not sure though, as "-java"
could also mean an extension for java), but there are packages
for which one cannot remember/know all command they define.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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