Anti-feature: installing and replacing applications on update

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 04:29:12PM +0000, Bernie wrote:
> I think there is a development issue here. I ran:
> 
> $ aptitude why nautilus
> i   accountsservice       Suggests gnome-control-center
> i A gnome-control-center  Depends  gnome-settings-daemon (>= 3.7.91)
> i A gnome-settings-daemon Depends  nautilus-data (>= 2.91.3-1)
> i A nautilus-data         Suggests nautilus
> 
> (I already uninstalled nautilus, so it stops there.)
> 
> The development issue, as I see it, is that accountsservice suggests
> gnome-control-center on a system which doesn't have gnome installed. This
> is the first time I've read `aptitude why` output so I could be wrong but
> it seems  that Ubuntu is somewhat too eager to install auxiliary packages.

Suggests never cause packages to be installed by default.  They're
essentially informational.

> PS why does nautilus-data suggest nautilus? Isn't that like feet suggesting
> legs?

Enhances would probably be a marginally better field to use, but since
it's informational it doesn't really matter that much.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]