On Mon, Oct 02, 2023 at 09:43:39AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2023-10-02 at 09:28, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> > Yeah, the one for which I had to manually use "dpkg -i".
>
> That information is not tracked.
>
> What is tracked is "the package versions known to be available from each
> registered repository" and "the package versions which are installed".
There *is* tracking. Packages can be marked as "automatically installed"
or not. The problem is, the marking is not consistent with user
expectations.
>From apt-patterns(7):
?automatic, ~M
Selects packages that were installed automatically.
[...]
EXAMPLES
[...]
apt list '~i !~M (~slibs|~sperl|~spython)'
List all manually-installed packages in sections matching libs,
perl, or python.
But if you try this locally, you'll discover that a bunch of packages
are listed which you don't expect.
unicorn:~$ apt list '~i !~M'
Listing... Done
abcde/stable,stable,now 2.9.3-1 all [installed]
acl/stable,now 2.3.1-3 amd64 [installed]
adduser/stable,stable,now 3.134 all [installed]
alsa-utils/stable,now 1.2.8-1 amd64 [installed]
an/stable,now 1.2-7+b1 amd64 [installed]
apt-listchanges/stable,stable,now 3.24 all [installed]
apt-transport-https/stable,stable,now 2.6.1 all [installed]
apt-utils/stable,now 2.6.1 amd64 [installed]
apt/stable,now 2.6.1 amd64 [installed]
aptitude/stable,now 0.8.13-5 amd64 [installed]
at/stable,now 3.2.5-1+b1 amd64 [installed]
[...]
I didn't need to install "adduser" or "apt" manually, for example, and
yet they're listed here. As it turns out, most (or all?) of the packages
that were installed by the installer *also* show up as manually installed.
This makes it unsuitable for most people's purposes.
