Package: apt Version: 0.7.25.3 Severity: normal *** Please type your report below this line ***
Hi, Having recently marked as "automatically installed" a whole bunch of packages, so not to have to manually sort which should be removed without harm, from which whose removal would really bring harm, I have been a tad upset to realize midori and epiphany-browser had not been uninstalled. Checking why teached me this was noticeably because of the sun-java6-plugin. Its "logical or" dependency upon a whole bunch of packages indeed has been enough to make APT consider midori and epiphany-browser are used, even though iceweasel and konqueror are themselves manually installed. Fiddling a bit about why, I came to realize sun-java6-plugin depends on a logical "or" in respect with about any browser. Same thing if I uninstall java6 : the non-free flash-plugin somehow depends on www-browser, which midori and epihany-browser provide. And it seems to be a reason enough to keep them ! I guess this crap happens with anything requiring www-browser, and I also guess this happens whenever "provides" and "logical ors" are involved. I should precize I use the APT-wide settings : Apt::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant "false"; Apt::Install-Recommends "false"; ... and that, for a reason. Before activating those I had about 2500 packages installed on the system I am playing with at this time. After those, I only have a bit more than 1000 packages installed (and still a lot I could leave without) : I already seriously thought the recommends/suggests paradigm was totally broken (why isn't unrar-free recommended, but only suggested, as are all the other compression tools, when I ask for ark being installed ? And why are all those instead only suggested when I install file-roller ? And then, why is mldonkey-server recommended, and not only suggested, when you install kmldonkey, which yelds a started-and-stopped-with-an-error init script at the boot ?). I will never approach again, even with a barepole, these grotesque and inconsistent notions (don't tell me about a packaging-human problem : I believe the problem lies in the very recommends/suggests paradigm, though it is not the place to detail why). But now, in my quest to clean the plague, I realized one of the things I like a lot in Debian (the ability to differentiate automatically installed packages from manually installed ones) is as much broken. Install gnome, install java6, remove gnome : and voilà - if you trust APT, and avoid doing the work it should do on his own, you're stuck with epiphany-browser (and all the dependencies it pulls, not to speak about the pile of dirt in the GUI apps menu, or in /usr/share/docs) forever, even if you have manually specified you really wanted other browsers... seriously ? Really, please implement an APT-wide "Apt:Autoremove::Automatic-logical-when-stronger-request" or such thing. APT should really be able to think that way (maybe not by default, to be coherent with the oh-so-wrong way of installing recommends by default - but this has to be a possibility). Please realize that having epiphany-browser and midori for the sole purpose of satisfying immediate (logical) dependencies, which are anyway already satisfied by stronger wishes (and even if I hadn't konqueror set manually, I'd still consider it a stronger wish, as KDE being _manually_ installed on my sytem, and this one depending on konqueror, it would anyway derive from a direct wish, contrarily to epiphany-browser, once gnome uninstalled). Lots of disk space is no excuse for the borking APT is responsible for these days. And this is only amongst the things that need to be done to clean the mess (like the inability of debootstrap or the debian installer to even set automatic tags on packages, for instance). Discouragement towards this totally borked mess (I for now try to repair this clunky situation using python-apt home-made scripts) has even triggered in me a long asleep urge to see what other distributions do with package managers... Debian-centric as I am, this tells a lot on the whole mess APT has come to (sad, but true). Seriously, package management should not have anything to do with package tinkering. -- Package-specific info: -- (no /etc/apt/preferences present) -- -- /etc/apt/sources.list -- deb http://mirror.home-dn.net/debian-multimedia sid main non-free deb http://ftp2.fr.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages apt depends on: ii debian-archive-keyring 2010.08.15 GnuPG archive keys of the Debian a ii libc6 2.11.2-2 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib ii libgcc1 1:4.4.4-8 GCC support library ii libstdc++6 4.4.4-8 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3 apt recommends no packages. Versions of packages apt suggests: ii apt-doc 0.7.25.3 Documentation for APT ii aptitude 0.6.3-3 terminal-based package manager (te pn bzip2 <none> (no description available) pn dpkg-dev <none> (no description available) ii lzma 4.43-14 Compression method of 7z format in ii python-apt 0.7.96.1 Python interface to libapt-pkg -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
