Unsupported and no longer available packages can be dealt with better by extending u-r-u, for example. They are not a valid argument for autoremoving packages still suggested by other packages.
As I mentioned before, it seems reasonable to me that u-r-u would autoremove more than apt by setting SuggestsImportant to false. That solves (well, it improves, it's not an optimal solution) the problem of accumulated cruft during dist upgrades while at the same time not affecting operation on a running system. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to apt in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1725861 Title: APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false" should be the default Status in apt package in Ubuntu: Triaged Status in apt source package in Bionic: Triaged Bug description: After an upgrade to 17.10, I took a look at how much cruft I had accumulated on my system, and started marking various packages 'auto' which I know I don't care about keeping installed. apt autoremove didn't remove nearly as much stuff as I expected, and as I dug down into some of them I found that a number of them were being kept because other packages on the system have Suggests: referencing them. This is asymmetric and wrong. If Suggested packages are not automatically installed by default, then a Suggests should also not prevent a package from being automatically removed. After a web search led me to 'https://askubuntu.com/questions/351085 /how-to-remove-recommended-and-suggested-dependencies-of-uninstalled- packages', I set 'APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false"' in my apt config; apt autoremove now wants to remove 365MiB of packages from my system. That is a LOT of cruft that has accumulated over the years of upgrades, none of which I have ever asked to be installed and all of which were universe or no-longer-available packages. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1725861/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
