Re: aptitude keeps trying to replace my vim-gtk and ftpd

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Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 15:35:06 -0700
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

On Wednesday 03 November 2004 12:35, Wayne Topa wrote:
> Jules Dubois(3f88o9g02@sneakemail.com) is reported to have said:
> > On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:54:56 -0500, Wayne Topa wrote:
> > > I just ran aptitude and it got "The following packages are unused and
> > > will be REMOVED". There are 8 packages it wants to remove, one of
> > > which is bluefish, which I am using as I run aptitude.(?)
> >
> > Bluefish is an HTML editor based on GTK, not an aptitude helper. Or
> > did you mean you were running the two applications at the same time?
>
> Yes runnig bluefish editing my home web page.
>
> > > A lot of people swear by aptitude but this behavior has made me swear
> > > _at_ it more and more.
> >
> > If you want to keep bluefish, tell aptitude you installed it
> > "manually".
>
> I didn't install it manually. I had a total system wipeout about a
> month ago and got the 14 disk Sarge release disks to get back online.
> It was part of the workstation install. BTW I have been running
> Debian since '94 and I have never had as many problems with an
> installation as I did this time. Still working on getting everything
> I had before the melt-down working again (over 2 weeks now).
>
Note that if you use aptitude to install the package "gnome", then all of
the dependencies of that package will be tagged as automatically installed,
and when you request that "gnome" be removed, aptitude will remove all the
automatically installed dependencies, too (provided they're not needed by a
manually installed package). This behavior is great when it's exactly what
you want, and no worse than apt-get's when you don't.

> > > There _might_ be some good reason for the way aptitude doese
> > > things but I can't find them.
> >
> > Bluefish is marked as "automatically installed", and since
> > (apparently) nothing you've installed "manually" depends on it,
> > aptitude is removing it for you.
>
> AFAIK aptitude installed it in the first place. What I don't
> understand is, how did it decide I wasn't using it? ie:
> "The following packages are unused" ??? As bluefish is an HTML
> editor I wonder what I should install that could/would smarten up
> aptitude?
>
Any package that depends on bluefish would do it. Another, easier way, is
to mark the package as manually installed. Then, aptitude will never try
to remove it in this manner.

> > > I would appreciate any explaination for this bizarre behaviour.
> >
> > What you're describing is a feature of aptitude. You can stop it,
> > easily, from removing bluefish if you really wanted to keep
> > bluefish. There may be a way to stop aptitude from removing
> > "unused" packages, but since I want it to do that, I haven't
> > checked.
> >
> > There's nothing bizarre involved.
>
> Well it struck me a bit odd that I had bluefish runing an edit of my
> web page and aptitude was somehow informed that it wasn't being used.
>
aptitude has a different definition of the word "used" (fortunately, it uses
the commonly accepted definition of the word "is"). "Used", to aptitude,
means that a package that you manually installed depends on it. Aptitude
doesn't care if the application is running, it only checks if any packages
installed on your system depend on bluefish (or whatever package). If
there are none (or all the ones it finds were automatically installed to
satisfy dependencies), it tries to remove the package.

> In the two weeks I've been trying to get back to where I was, apitiude
> has removed then installed then removed over 50 Meg of packages.
> Thank God most were on the CD set!
>
> Thanks for your reply. I think I'll just remove aptitude and keep
> doing the dselsct update ; apt-get dist-upgrade. Seems a bit more
> understandable then what I have seen from aptitude.
>
> Thanks again
>
> Wayne

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• Previous message: Aaron Thoreson: "post-2.6 upgrade problems"
• In reply to: Wayne Topa: "Re: aptitude keeps trying to replace my vim-gtk and ftpd"
• Next in thread: Jules Dubois: "Re: aptitude keeps trying to replace my vim-gtk and ftpd"
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