APT Is Nagging Me To Remove Things I Don't Want To Remove

[Derek Broughton]

Dave Vincenty wrote:

> Mike Leone wrote:
>> Can you expand ?. So they're marked as "AutoInstalled"; that doesn't
>> explain (to me) why that means that now they can be deleted.
> 
> I think the idea is that, if you didn't ask for a package, and that
> package isn't being used for anything, as far as the system can tell,
> then it's just taking up space on your drive, and so it has a "feature"
> of removing it for you.
> 
> Now, let's see here...
> 
> girardhenri at free.fr wrote:
>> They are dependencies
>> they don' works with new stuff
> 
> Possibility #1:  A lot of these packages really do need to be removed.
> That might be true, although...
> 
> Derek Broughton wrote:
>> "apt" doesn't think anything needs to be removed.  You have now got it
>> back into a consistent state. aptitude has it's own tools for figuring
>> out (better) what needs to be kept, but that relies on having installed
>> with aptitude in the first place.  That said, passing that entire list to
>> "aptitude unmarkauto" would fix aptitude.
> 
> It seems like all those packages depended on kubuntu-desktop, as the
> first response I got said, but aptitude is doing its own thing and,
> actually, the reason I don't use aptitude much anymore is because I once
> accidentally allowed it to autoremove 100 "unused" packages, some of
> which apparently, my X server couldn't start without, and then I went
> GUI-less for a while.

That's why Donn said it was potentially dangerous.  I was an aptitude
early-adopter, and I use it exclusively now, but making the change from
apt-get to aptitude required me to _very_ carefully vet the aptitude
decisions for a couple of weeks.  I marked every 'lib' package as
auto-installed, then unmarked all the java ones (which are generally
standalone), then spent ages marking & unmarking packages until the ones I
needed stayed on the system.

> So... I guess this is a non-issue.  If I decide I could use some free
> hard drive space, I'll have to figure out for myself what to remove.

pretty much.  You start by removing kubuntu-desktop, then you decide which
of the dependencies you can live without (or you remove some dependency of
k-d, which forces the removal of k-d, then you're in the same boat).
-- 
derek