Bug#490962: apt: Removing many packages after installing them temporarily
Package: apt
Version: 0.7.14+b1
Severity: wishlist
When I e.g. want to build a package myself, I often have to install build-depends
packages, which I want to remove again afterwards. I would like apt-get to have a
convenient way to do this, so that the user doesn't have to keep a list of the
temporarily installed packages, and then uninstall them manually. This is also
convenient in any situation when one wants a set of packages that are not all
dependent on one package (if they were, then auto-remove would works fine after
having uninstalled the one package that depended on the others.
One way would be to define a self-chosen tag when installing something:
apt-get --def-tag MYTAG install
After that one could uninstall all the packages by running something like
dpkg --purge --tag MYTAG
In addition, a function --listtags would be convenient. It could list all tags
that are defined, and the packages corresponding to each tag.
It could happen that it is not possible to uninstall alle the packages that
correspond to a specific tag, because some other package depends on some of them.
In that case dpkg should uninstall the packages that are uninstallable and leave
the others. A preference setting could indicate if the tag definition should be
deleted when the uninstallation of all the packages corresponding to the tag could
not be fully complete.
I guess this could be done by running apt-get once with --print-uris together with
some scripting to get a list of the packages that are going to be installed.
That way one could run 'dpkg --purge $(cat list_of_debs.txt)' afterwards. But it
would be simpler to have this functionality integrated in apt-get/dpkg.
Best regards,
Torquil Sørensen
-- Package-specific info:
-- (/etc/apt/preferences present, but not submitted) --
-- (/etc/apt/sources.list present, but not submitted) --
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (650, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii debian-archive-keyring 2008.04.16+nmu1 GnuPG archive keys of the Debian a
ii libc6 2.7-12 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libgcc1 1:4.3.1-6 GCC support library
ii libstdc++6 4.3.1-6 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
apt recommends no packages.
-- no debconf information
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