On Tuesday, January 08, 2013 22:18:07, James E. LaBarre wrote: > On 01/08/2013 08:59 PM, Chris Knadle wrote: > > Aptitude doesn't "automatically" *do* anything -- though however in terms > > of /selection/ it will respect your choice, and if you're removing > > something that's a dependency on other packages, it will set those other > > packages as "broken" and requiring an action to be taken on the broken > > packages. > > Yeah, I think I phrased that wrong. I meant more that Aptitude would > offer to remove all the "orphaned" packages along with whatever > install/remove you *did* want to do, without providing an option to say > "no, please leave them".
Yeah, I agree. This behavior is settable via the command line option or configuration file setting I mentioned. [I haven't used the option so I don't yet know the behavor when changing the setting.] I wasn't trying to point out incorrect phrasing, BTW -- that's oaky -- I understood where you were coming from. Really what I was trying to do was to let you know that I agreed with you that aptitude is awful at first (likewise I know a number of people that started with dselect that aren't able to make the switch to aptitude), but that in the end there actually /is/ a reason to brave the madness -- not meant as a sales pitch -- but rather only to give you a "for your reference" data point. > apt-get will tell you of orphaned packages, but will simply say "you can > run apt-get autoremove to remove them". My problem with aptitude had > been it wants to run "autoremove" for every action. And since it didn't > do anything more for me than apt-get does, I never bothered hunting down > a fix. Mostly right. I don't know how you'd set a package as "manually" or "automatically" installed in apt-get though, so AFAIK there isn't a 100% overlap of apt-get features vs aptitude. Likewise apt-get doesn't have a search feature (that's where apt-cache is useful), isn't menu-driven, etc. They're really different tools, even though the end-goal of the tools are similar. I don't personally use 'autoremove' BTW; if/when I want to purge orphans I do that by running this a few times... mostly out of habit I guess: deborphan [manually check output list] dpkg -P $(deborphan) I mostly try to avoid using apt-get directly, mainly because I like aptitude's logging -- but I also often end up using 'dpkg -i <package>' for installing locally-created pakages. One thing to note with dpkg is that it has the disadvantage that anything installed by it is marked as "manually" installed. Installing metapackages via dpkg is thus troublesome, because it causes more work to "clean up" after removing the metapapackage to remove the unneeded dependencies. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
