Bug#1113974: ITP: apt-suggest-auto -- Suggests and optionally marks manually installed packages as automatic

[Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org>]

Hi,

On 05/09/25 at 04:06 +0000, Ananthu C V wrote:
> On 4 September 2025 19:33:15 UTC, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> wrote:
> > apt-suggest-auto is a tool designed to help manage installed packages by
> > identifying those that were manually installed but could be marked as
> > automatically installed.
> Isn't `apt-mark minimize-manual` doing the exact same thing? or does this have more functionalities?

What minimize-manual does is:

  for each package in the APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections (by default:
  metapackages, tasks),
    mark all dependencies (recursively) as Auto

What apt-suggest-auto does is:

  for each manually installed package,
    Try to mark it as auto.
    If APT thinks that it should be removed (as part of autoremove),
      mark it manual again

So the advantages of apt-suggest-auto over minimize-manual are:
* it works over all packages (minimize-manual only starts from
  metapackages and tasks)
* it delegates making a decision about each package to APT's algorithm
  used for autoremove (minimize-manual does its own dependency tree
  analysis)

As a result, I found that it provides much more interesting results when
trying to clean up a system from cruft accumulated over the years.

Actually, the discussion on the MR to integrate this directly into APT
includes replacing minimize-manual.

For reference, compared to deborphan:
* deborphan only looks at the libs, oldlibs, introspection sections
* deborphan implements its own dependency tree analysis

And compared to debfoster:
* debfoster uses its own database to list packages to keep ('keepers'
  file) so this duplicates APT's manual/auto marking (but debfoster
  predates this APT feature)
* debfoster does its own dependency tree analysis

Lucas