[Bug 1800610] Re: [SRU] minimize number of manually installed packages

[Timo Aaltonen]

Hello Julian, or anyone else affected,

Accepted livecd-rootfs into bionic-proposed. The package will build now
and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/livecd-
rootfs/2.525.20 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package.  See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation on how
to enable and use -proposed.  Your feedback will aid us getting this
update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug,
mentioning the version of the package you tested and change the tag from
verification-needed-bionic to verification-done-bionic. If it does not
fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the
tag to verification-failed-bionic. In either case, without details of
your testing we will not be able to proceed.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification .  Thank you in
advance for helping!

N.B. The updated package will be released to -updates after the bug(s)
fixed by this package have been verified and the package has been in
-proposed for a minimum of 7 days.

** Tags added: verification-needed verification-needed-bionic

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1800610

Title:
  [SRU] minimize number of manually installed packages

Status in livecd-rootfs package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in livecd-rootfs source package in Xenial:
  New
Status in livecd-rootfs source package in Bionic:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  [Impact]
  Releases prior to cosmic mark almost all packages manually installed, meaning that obsolete packages are not autoremoved when they should. We fixed this in cosmic, in trunk r1695, by including a new script that marks as automatically installed all dependencies of manually-installed metapackages.

  [Test case]
  Run a build and check in the log that some packages are visited by the script in more than one iterations. 

  [Regression potential]
  First of all, this does not change existing installations; only new ones. The change can cause packages to be autoremoved that were not autoremoved before after performing a package management operation, or dependency change in packages.

  The change is essentially safe: Since we only mark dependencies of
  packages in the section "metapackages", and since those receive
  special treatment by apt:

  1. removal due to dependencies/conflicts: the manual bit transfers from the meta to its deps
  2. explicit removal (apt remove meta): meta and its dependencies are removed

  It is not possible to accidentally uninstall the entire metapackage
  with its dependencies.

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