On 25-07-17, Greg Wooledge wrote: > Is there any way to permanently neuter apt-get autoremove, so that even > if something invokes it against my will, it will *never* remove anything? > > And more, is there a way to get apt and apt-get to *stop* prompting me > to run it, and *stop* spamming me with a list of packages that it would > like me to remove? (Maybe that's the same as the first question, maybe > not.) > > My strategy so far has been "ignore the spam, and never willingly run > autoremove". This mostly works, but I recently learned that tasksel > will apparently run an autoremove, without warning, whether I want it > to or not (<http://bugs.debian.org/868892>). > > If autoremove will also remove *kernels*, which this thread seems to > indicate is the case, then my concerns just went up another notch. > > I suppose one could manually mark each and every single installed > package as "manually installed", but you'd have to remember to repeat > this periodically, and it seems clumsy and inelegant compared to some > sort of master switch that can just tell autoremove to go die in a fire. >
Your fear from autoremove is silly. It will not remove anything you really need and, if you stick to default settings, will keep all packages it replaced in /var/cache/apt/archives, as far as I know. And if you have some package that you really, really want to keep, you can always pin it, or put it on hold with apt-mark. It is not spam, it is keeping your system clean.
