On Sat, 31 Oct 2015 07:38:25 -0400 (EDT), Chris Bannister wrote: > > Oh great! They've fixed it. I hated having to "dpkg --purge aptitude" > after a new installation. If you want extra packages, it's just an > apt-get install <package> step away.
I used to use aptitude; but I've switched back to using apt, mainly because apt-get resolves "Recommends" dependencies during an upgrade while aptitude does not. But there is one thing that I like about aptitude that, if I could get equivalent functionality out of apt, I might not bother to install aptitude. aptitude, when run with no parameters, provides a full-screen interface. This full-screen interface lists package categories which can be expanded. One category in particular is of interest to me: "Obsolete and Locally Created Packages". By expanding this category, I can identify obsolete packages. (An obsolete package, by definition, is an installed package which no longer exists in the Debian archive.) 99% of the time, an obsolete package is one that I wish to purge. I've seen cases where packages are held back during "apt-get --purge dist-upgrade" processing until these obsolete packages are purged. But I have not found a way to easily identify obsolete packages using apt. There is an "autoremove" option on apt-get to remove packages which were automatically installed but which are no longer required by any installed package. But that is different. That's not the same thing as an obsolete package. An obsolete package may have been manually installed, but it's still obsolete, and I need to be able to identify it as such. Does anyone know an easy way to identify obsolete packages without using aptitide? -- .''`. Stephen Powell <zlinux...@wowway.com> : :' : `. `'` `-
