On Mon, 2016-02-29 at 18:52 +0000, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote: > Because marking a package auto means to tell aptitude "remove it from > my > system as soon as it's not needed". > > http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s02s06.html > > It works like this: when you install a package, aptitude will > automatically install any other packages on which it depends.
I know how it works, but that system alone is a bit limited, as it works only for those situations where there is actually a dependency expressed between the packages in question,... which in turn is however by far not every case where I install a package because of another package. E.g. I install m4-doc, because of m4, yet there is no dependency relation between them. So all I can do is either not have m4-doc auto-marked, and I'll probably forget it once m4 is deleted (in which case I don't need m4- doc anymore)... or I use the current system a bit less narrow-minded and set my own manual auto-flag. It may even go farther to say,... I install gimp and because I export my images as jpeg, I also install jpegoptim... these have nothing directly to do with each other and there will never be a dependency relationship between them. Still one may want to mark e.g. jpegoptim auto, in order not to forget about it. It may not be the primary way auto-installation/removal is intended to be used, but I see no reason why not to allow that use case. Actually the current system is even more "limited",... E.g. I may have a package xyz that recommends some python-gibberish... and I say, yes I want to use that functionality that python-gibberish gives to xyz. So it's marked auto-installed. Now I install abc further package abc, which e.g. suggest, but here I don't have any intentions to use that with python-gibberish. However, when I remove xyz, pyhton-gibberish, will of course not be auto-removed. > You can mark packages for removal and exit aptitude without removing > immediately, but this will not fly long and other tools of the system > might decide to remove it. But then it's in the scheduled list when I do anything else... > aptitude doesn't remove the flag now, but the package altogether, > which > is what the human requested (and what aptitude failed to do until > recently). > > If human doesn't want the package removed, human should revisit what > the > machine is asked to do. Well AFAIU, the flag means auto-installed, not do-auto-remove... and if I have auto-removal turned of I see no reason why one should forbid the other use case... Cheers, Chris.
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