Bug#594689: Still broken?
2010/9/28 Christian Jaeger <chrjae@gmail.com>:
> Removing synaptic and then running apt-get autoremove in fact removed
> kdebase-bin along with 6 other packages; so you're right, and I just
> have to figure out more of those recommends to remove all the packages
> that were installed because of my temporary install of kdm. (I may
> write a script/program some time to figure out the whole network and
> point out only-recommended packages, if there's no way to "force"
> autoremove to remove those.)
While a script will help in the finer granulated cases where you want
to decide which recommends is okay and which one not
(and please make sure to share it by publishing it somewhere),
APT wouldn't be APT if it wouldn't have an (undocumented) option
for turning off consideration of recommends in autoremove:
-o APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant=0
but remember that the installation of recommend packages is
recommend (SCNR) as policy defines it as packages which are
installed on all but non-default systems. So it is not unlikely
that you will loose functionality by removing "only" recommends…
That said, it is unfortunately true that some Recommends should
be Suggests instead, but these cases should be reported as bug
to get them fixed.
(Suggests can be considered in autoremove, too,
but the option is per default disabled)
In the synaptic case kdebase-bin is an or-group member btw, so
a solution exists in theory without kdebase-bin, but it is a non-trivial
edge case in general and a different already opened bugreport…
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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