Re: Uninstalling a package removes other essential packages: What is the best course of action?
On Sat 12 Feb 2022 at 17:03:06 (+0100), Stella Ashburne wrote:
> I did a minimal install of LXQt:
>
> sudo apt install lxqt-core lightdm
>
> and discovered that the following two packages were installed as well:
>
> libthai-data/stable,now 0.1.28-3 all [installed,automatic]
> libthai0/stable,now 0.1.28-3 amd64 [installed,automatic]
Installing those two would add 170 more packages to my system, so
I presume quite a lot more besides those two were installed on yours.
> *I do not speak or write Thai*
Nor I.
> When I did the following
>
> sudo apt remove libthai*
>
> I was very surprised to see that many packages that I think are essential to running Debian properly would be removed if I answered "Yes" to the question "Do you want to continue?"
>
> What should I do?
You should type:
$ apt-cache rdepends libthai0
and notice that the printed list includes libpango-1.0-0.
So now type:
$ apt-cache rdepends libpango-1.0-0 | less
and that shows the cause of your problem. Whether or not
you read Thai, in order to typeset a document that contains,
say, an aphorism in a foreign language, you need to at least
know how to lay out that language, which includes how its
words break or are spaced.
>From a very superficial reading of APT-ish metadata, I'd guess
that you might have spotted the language Thai because there
are some wrinkles in pango's support for it, and perhaps those
led to libthai* being linked to it.
Anyway, the upshot is that you'll have a job to run a system
without pango's support for text.
> What is the best course of action?
Leave it. Worry about bigger issues than the odd library.
Cheers,
David.
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