On 27 February 2012 18:51, Niels Thykier <[email protected]> wrote: > > """ > 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. >
Perhaps a package was previously auto-installed, now it's dependencies have been removed and you would like some suggestion as to why it was installed in the first place. > 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. > The chain will start at a manually installed package if possible, only if it can't do that are not installed packages considered. >> "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". > The package states are displayed, so there is enough information there to see whether a package is orphaned or not. Though admitedly because this is not as easy as if "aptitude why" simply returned no reason for the orphaned packages (or put a big notice at the top/bottom of it's output.) > > [1] Btw, I hope we both agree on "orphaned" here means > "unused"/"discovered by deborphan" and not "orphaned" as in "package > without (active) maintainer". > Yes, that is how I understood you. _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
