How to clean up unnecessary dependencies?

[Derek Broughton]

Steve Turnbull wrote:

> All of the front end apps (Synaptic, Kynaptic, Aptitude et al) all track
> these dependencies for this reason. 

I'm fairly certain only aptitude actually does that...  All of the GUI
package tools simply use apt-get or aptitude as a back end.

> running, I have to use apt-get (don't like aptitude) 

What's not to like?  It's got a virtually identical command line interface -
except that it cleans up some of the oddness (e.g., purge is an actual
command instead of an option for "remove").  It takes a little time to
train it when converting from an apt-get installed system - it doesn't know
that anything was installed automatically.
> 
> I have never used deborphan, but will look into this. Has anyone else had
> any bad experiences with it?

Yes - it removes _anything_ named 'lib*' (or perhaps it's from the libs
section of the repository) that isn't marked as a dependency of an
installed package.  Sometimes they aren't dependencies. Unlike aptitude,
there's no way to mark these as "auto" or not, so you can't just prevent
deborphan from selecting them the next time round.
-- 
derek