On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:40:23PM +0200, Stella Ashburne wrote: > Question: Instead of using "aptitude why unattended-upgrades" command, can I > use "apt why unattended-upgrades"?
Well, try it and see. > I was told many years ago that the command "aptitude" was deprecated. You were lied to. aptitude does *many* things that no other tool does. > Question: What do you mean by "a metapackage is not critically important"? > Would you like to elaborate please? Take a look at "apt show gnome", for example. On bullseye, on my platform, the package "gnome" (which is a metapackage) has an Installed-Size of 35.8 kB. It doesn't contain any software. All it really contains are Depends: and Recommends: and Suggests: lines. If you install this package, it will bring in a whole bunch of new packages (unless you already installed GNOME, in which case it may do nothing). Once all of those packages are installed, you can go ahead and remove the package named "gnome". It doesn't do anything. It's just a metapackage. > I wish to improve my knowledge of computing. How do I disable autoremove? > What is the command to be typed in a terminal? Well... OK, I'll tell you how I did it. It's easily reversible, so it won't hurt you. I did it by creating the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99local with the following content (one line): APT::NeverAutoRemove "."; What this configuration file does is define a regular expression that matches every package, and then tells apt never to autoremove any package that matches that regular expression. If you want to go back to normal, simply remove that file.
