On 8/17/25 20:18, David Wright wrote:
On Sun 17 Aug 2025 at 14:05:03 (-0700), David Christensen wrote:On 8/17/25 06:28, Greg Wooledge wrote:On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 23:00:29 -0700, David Christensen wrote:# apt-get purge firefox-esrSince the goal is to reinstall firefox-esr shortly afterward, we don't really want to remove anything that depends on firefox-esr, such as a desktop environment metapackage. Even worse, a metapackage that has a line like "Depends: firefox-esr | other-browser" might bring in some other browser we don't want. So, this command might be better: dpkg --purge --force-depends firefox-esrIf `apt-get purge firefox-esr` purges up the desktop or other packages would should be precursors, that would be a serious bug.If I understand your terminology,
Sorry for the scrambled thoughts. Please let me clarify.If `apt-get purge firefox-esr` purges the desktop or other packages that casual observers would expect to be unrelated, then that would be a serious bug.
then I don't understand where the serious bug is. My firefox-esr is a dependency of firefox-esr-l10n-en-gb, and when setting up the system, installing firefox-esr-l10n-en-gb pulled in firefox-esr. But libreoffice-help-en-gb also depends on a browser, and I made sure to install it after firefox-esr-l10n-en-gb so that it didn't pull in some other browser.¹ So if I remove firefox-esr, APT will dutifully install epiphany-browser² and any of its dependencies that are lacking. Not what we want.
Do you mean "So if I remove firefox-esr, APT will dutifully uninstall epiphany-browser"? And, libreoffice is also uninstalled? If so, the term "dependency hell" comes to mind.
All the more justification for "backup, wipe, install, restore". David