On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Daniel Burrows <dburr...@debian.org> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:28:38PM +0000, Aneurin Price > <aneurin.pr...@gmail.com> 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. >
Hmm, what happens in the case that exactly one of B or C is marked auto? >> Assume you have aptitude set not to install recommends automatically. > > How did you do that? Just from the internal options menu? > Yes, as I recall. Maybe tweaked a config file but I guess that's equivalent. >> 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. > I read that as saying that setting the option from the preferences menu, rather than the command-line, will *not* automatically enable Aptitude::Keep-Recommends. Is that correct? > 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. Possibly this is the root of it then. Either way it's not a big enough issue that I can be bothered to look into it, to be honest. Nye -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
