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Re: Keep important/required packages installed.



On 12/13/11 00:35, David Kalnischkies wrote:
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 14:05, dE .<de.techno@gmail.com>  wrote:
On 12/12/11 23:48, David Kalnischkies wrote:
On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 14:42, dE .<de.techno@gmail.com>    wrote:
I was wondering if there was a way (in apt.conf maybe) to keep
important/required packages installed even if marked installed
automatically? For e.g. if I mark nano as automatically installed, it
tends
to be removed.
The question is then why you mark it as automatically installed
(and therefore as "remove if no longer needed")
if you don't want it to be automatically removed…

But have a look at /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove to see how
e.g. the kernel package is protected from being autoremoved
even though they are autoinstalled (by a kernel metapackage).
I was wondering about keeping the list of manually installed packages clean
so I can remove the irrelevant packages (as per requirements) without
searching in a longer list.

Unfortunately /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove is a list of packages, I was
looking forward towards an automated way.
Hu? I don't understand what you want.
What do you want to automate?
And why is the list of manually packages too long for you?
If you manage this list correctly the for you important nano is
marked as manual while all the "irrelevant" packages are marked
as automatic installed.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies
Ok, let's look at one of my Gentoo installs.

Gentoo has a world file in /var/lib/portage/world which contains a list of packages which where are manually installed. Like with Debian, Gentoo too has important system packages installed like bash, gcc etc... etc... etc... These packages are not listed in /var/lib/portage/world, but still when Gentoo checks for orphan packages, it doesn't remove these important system packages; as a consequence, these important packages dont have to be listed in the world file, keeping it clean and making it easy to see which packages where manually installed for the purpose of housekeeping.

This is what I wanted with apt too, i.e. even if packages with priority important/required are marked automatically installed, it'll not be removed when apt searches for orphan packages.

Currently
aptitude search '~i' | grep '^i.A' --invert-match | wc --lines
results in 261 packages, off which ~150 are are having important/required priority.

So don't you think, removing 150 (more than half) packages from the list will improve the clutter?


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