On 25.05.20 23:24, Liam O'Toole wrote:
[...] It's OK. I understood your question the first time. The simple answer is that the '--no-install-recommends' option applies only to the current install command. The result of a subsequent remove command will depend on the state of the dependency graph as a whole at the time.
So, no "undo" is in apt available, its database does not store sufficient information for it. :-( This is what I see as a severe bug.
Not your fault, thanks for your input! I have had hope for a moment that there would exist some "undo" solution, maybe some not by default installed package carrying a command for it, a package somewhere in the repository and I missed to find it.
Manual bumbling is now needed. Fortunately I have only used the 'apt' command for all installations, from the beginning, and not used apt-get directly or aptitude or synaptic. Therefore I at least have a complete log on all manually given 'apt install' commands in /var/log/apt/history.log , to which the 'apt' command also registers the full command with all its parameters as having been used (some of the other mentioned tools do not log the exact given command, only the result of it). I now would have to write some script, some LogFile to InstallationScript parser, in order to get what I thought would happen as an "undo" by 'apt purge package'.
As I am still quite new here on the Debian mailing lists, was this a topic before? Does it qualify for a bug report for motivating some clever programmers to enhance the apt cache with logging the necessary information? Or was it already an overheating topic in the past and I better don't spark?