Re: how to find why packages are automatically installed?

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:28:38PM +0000, Aneurin Price <aneurin.price@xxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
To expand upon this, I believe the OP's situation is some behaviour I've
also seen, which seemed odd until I thought about it and couldn't actually
come up with a better way:

I'm pretty sure this is different -- I was talking about the
situation of "A Depends: B | C". People sometimes think that if both
B and C are installed, aptitude should guess which one they don't want
and remove it.

Assume you have aptitude set not to install recommends automatically.

How did you do that? Just from the internal options menu?

It's annoying because it means that install and purge are not symmetric
operations, and I initially felt (in the case where aptitude is set no to
install recommends) that aptitude should remove packages marked as
automatically installed when no packages depend on them. However, this
could have the effect of causing half the system to be uninstalled when
aptitude is changed from 'install recommends' to 'ignore recommends', so I
presume that's why it's not done. For all I know there's a setting
somewhere to make it do this :P.

The setting is Aptitude::Keep-Recommends. But in fact, this isn't
enabled by default, although passing --without-recommends on the
command-line enables it automatically for exactly the reason you pointed
out.

Another problem is that aptitude now uses apt for the autoremove
stuff, so the variables that control that keep changing and I don't
always find out / remember the new names. e.g., I just (re)discovered
"Apt::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant", which has more or less the same
effect as Aptitude::Keep-Recommends, and also defaults to "true". To
make aptitude actually remove recommended packages, you need to set that
to "false" along with Keep-Recommends.

Daniel


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How can I refresh Etch completely?
    ... 150+ "unused" packages, including Gnome. ... Then use aptitude / synaptic to dig through and resolve ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ... Trouble? ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Files piling up in /var/* directories
    ... aptitude autoclean ... The first command removes all obsolete packages from the cache; ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a subject of "unsubscribe". ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: how to find why packages are automatically installed?
    ... aptitude should guess which one they don't want ... automatically installed when no packages depend on them. ... aptitude is changed from 'install recommends' to 'ignore recommends', ... command-line enables it automatically for exactly the reason you pointed ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Is apt-get still the cool package installer?
    ... I'll look into aptitude and synaptic. ... Now it wants me to 'apt-get autoremove' telling me that "The ... packages that I use on a daily basis. ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Printing with lprng; no CUPS! :-)
    ... The following packages will be automatically REMOVED: ... Could some of that problem be having aptitude treat recommends as ... That gs does require libcupsys2 and libcupsimage2; ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
    (Debian-User)