Finding "orphaned" packages with deb-orphan?

[Martin Maney]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 12:25:54AM -0500, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:
> I also would like a package's dependencies to be removed when I remove a 
> package so long as those dependencies aren't needed by any other package.  
> I'd like a chance to override this, but in the vast majority of cases I 
> don't want unused packages on the system because I would rather use the 
> space they occupy for other things.

That was exactly the touted advantage of aptitude that got me to try it
out originally.  I've stayed with it because, after acclimating to
aptitude's way of doing things, I think it beats dselect on every
point... er, except for updating whatever it is that dpkg --list needs
to have updated in order to reflect the latest package statuses.  But
for interactive use (and I've always liked to *see* what was getting
yanked in to satisfy dependencies, etc.) it's aptitude all the way.  In
another comparison, Synaptic has always felt clunky and unhelpful next
to aptitude.  That plus the fact that I do a lot of remote maintenance
over ssh, where a text-mode tool just seems more natural, even if a GUI
version is installed...

-- 
To fix that one, I'd have to travel all the way back to the early eighties
and convince the BSD design team to improve the diagnostics abilities of
the Unix kernel in general, and of select(2) in particular.  And while I
could certainly do that, I'm worried of the consequences - the BSD vs.
System V split might never have happened, Unix would have ruled the world,
we'd all be programming in awk++, and Bill Gates would be an obscure
patent lawyer that no one had heard of.  -- Guido van Rossum