Package: synaptic Version: 0.75.1ubuntu2 Severity: wishlist Thank you for Synaptic. I've tried all the other popular package managers and this is definitely the best (although it could borrow some ideas from YaST).
I like to keep my system free from unnecessary packages, and a feature that would greatly help me do this would be a tool that would go through each package not marked as auto-installed and check if any dependant package is installed. If any dependant package is installed, mark the current package as auto-installed. This seems like a simple algorithm to implement. One other similar feature would also help: a tool that would first mark all installed packages as auto-installed and then go through each package marked as auto-installed, checking if any dependant package is installed. The tool would go through the "tree" of packages and only unmark the main package(s) as auto-installed. This algorithm comes to mind: - a pointer to an array of installed packages (the packages in this array could be sorted by decreasing number of dependencies, to increase the efficiency of the tool) would be supplied to a recurring function, which would also accept a single package as a second parameter; - this function would pick the first package still in the array (if that second parameter isn't given) and remove that package from the array; - then, if the function finds that none of the dependant packages is installed, it unmarks the current package as auto-installed and exits; - otherwise, the function calls itself for each dependant packages still in the array; I don't even know if the programming language of Synaptic supports what i describe here, but any of these features would make it easier for a user to remove unnecessary packages, and the second function could be reused by an automated package removal tool. I am indeed a programmer, but i think such features would be easier to implement for someone who is already in the project. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
