apt irritating behaviour (fam and gamin)

[Adam D. Barratt]

On Thursday, February 03, 2005 11:42 AM, Sridhar Ratna
<sridharinfinity at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had 'fam' installed.  I then installed gamin and gamin-dev, which
> eventually replaced fam.  But when I tried 'apt-get remove'ing gamin,
> it asked to remove about 115 packages including gnome apps ....

Yes, because the gnome-desktop-environment package depends on fam or gamin,
and the `gnome' package depends on gnome-desktop-environment.

> Even if when I tried to 'apt-get install fam' .. it asked to remove
> huge amount of packages including gamin.

Installing fam removes gamin, causing the dependencies mentioned above to be
broken. This is easy to fix - tell apt-get to remove gamin and install fam
*at the same time*

  apt-get install gamin- fam

(`apt-get remove fam+' should also work, afaics, but is rather less
intuitive)

> I do not expect that behaviour.  If I installed a package (gamin) ..
> and immediately decided to uninstall it .. only that package must be
> removed.

That's not really possible if other packages depend on the package you're
trying to remove...

Regards,

Adam