On -28163-01--10 20:59, Daniel Hartwig wrote: > Hello > > > Thanks for reporting this issue with aptitude. >
Hi, Thanks for the feedback... > > With regards to "orphaned" packages and the "why" command, the man > page says this: > > Explains the reason that a particular package should or cannot be > installed on the system. > > This command searches for packages that require or conflict with the > given package. It displays a sequence of dependencies leading to the > target package, along with a note indicating the installed state of > each package in the dependency chain: > > … > > By default aptitude outputs only the “most installed, strongest, > tightest, shortest” dependency chain.… > > You will note that the second paragraph does not mention any > restriction about only using installed packages, although the program > does try to use as many installed packages as possible in it's > response. > """ Explains the reason that a particular package should or cannot be installed on the system. """ Personally I read that as: """ "why" explains to you why package X is installed on your system. "why-not" explains to you why package X cannot be installed on your system. """ So I can see the reason for "why-not" giving me a package not installed on my system. But I have difficult in see what use I could have of "why" if it ignores my installed packages. For me, the "why" command would much more useful if it showed me the chain from a manually installed package to the package I asked for. Admittedly I do not feel strongly about this as I stopped using "aptitude why", so feel free to ignore this. > "aptitude why" is not a tool to locate orphaned packages. > I was not using "aptitude why" to locate orphaned nor unused packages[1]. I was using to double check suggestions from deborphan/$tool. Most of these tools rely on guesses/heurestics to produce its results and I found it can be useful to double-check what packages "keeps" it. These days I just feed the results to aptitude purge and see "what falls off". > I am closing this as it is not a bug, rather a feature which enables > investigation of dependency chains regardless of package installation > status. > > > Regards > As mentioned, I do not feel strongly for this, so fine with me. :) ~Niels [1] Btw, I hope we both agree on "orphaned" here means "unused"/"discovered by deborphan" and not "orphaned" as in "package without (active) maintainer". _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
