[Bug 667468] Re: apt-get autoremove don't find all packages

[Daniel Hartwig]

I have some final comments, I don't wish to start a dialog here since
there is a non-issue and I am glad for it to be closed.

On 19 September 2012 13:41, Sworddragon <667468 at bugs.launchpad.net> wrote:
> This all is now ~2 years ago and the dependencies of alsa-utils has
> changed so that I had to test it with other packages and apt-get
> autoremove PKG will work as expected: It removes the given package and
> does an autoremove after this.

Please check the man page for apt-get which documents that
“autoremove” takes no arguments.  You can not expect “apt-get
autoremove PKG" to do anything other than report an error: takes no
arguments.

… but readers of the report understood your point, that you expected:

# apt-get remove PKG
# apt-get autoremove

to remove all packages which were auto-installed by:

# apt-get install PKG

There are good reasons why this is not so.  The issue has been
reported several times and it is almost never a bug.

> It seems nobody has tried to fix this bug directly because he saw this
> ticket.

It is not clear there is a bug.

1. You try to use “autoremove PKG” which is not documented, therefore
can not be a bug.
2. We need to know the state of related packages on the system in
question to know whether the real “remove PKG && autoremove” should
have removed linux-sound-base or not.  This is no longer possible due
to the age of the report.

> I have seen often tickets which was miraculous fixed after a
> while. This is nothing special because some bugs are randomy fixed with
> a commit. And in ~2 years there were surely many commits released which
> had the chance to randomly fix this issue.

Indeed.  However the difference is that knowing a bug has been fixed
is not the same as no longer being able to reproduce it, which is the
case here.

I just ask you to keep this in mind when closing reports.  If you can
not reproduce: incomplete or invalid.  If you can identify when it was
fixed (changelog entry): fix released.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/667468

Title:
  apt-get autoremove don't find all packages

Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: apt

  I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 dev and apt 0.8.7ubuntu1. apt-get autoremove
  don't find all unused packages. For example if I install alsa-utils,
  linux-sound-base is installed as a needed package. If I try to
  autoremove alsa-utils, linux-sound-base is ignored. Only a second
  autoremove does remove linux-sound-base. I have made an example (it's
  in german because I don't know how to start apt in english but it
  should show the problem with the commands).

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