Question about 'aptitude'

[Derek Broughton]

Mario Vukelic wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 14:45 +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:
>> Aptitude is very smart. It will track, for example, which packages you
>> install manually, and which are just pulled in because some other
>> package depends on them.
>> If later you remove the manually installed package, aptitude will
>> remove
>> the dependencies as well, provided they aren't needed by something
>> else.
> 
> I forgot: if you switch to aptitude after using another package manager,
> it can sometimes take a while until it stops getting it wrong and
> wanting to remove stuff you -do- want.
> 
> If you are sure you want a package aptitude asks to remove, do an
> "aptitude install package", it will remember that.

Are you sure?  I don't think it will do anything if the package is already
installed.

# aptitude unmarkauto package

does the job.

# aptitude --schedule-only markauto '~Nlib.*'

is a good start at synchronizing the aptitude package state.  Then do 

# aptitude markauto PACKAGES 

for the libraries you really need. Only a few are not installed as
dependencies - 'lib.*-java' would match most of them, plus libdvdcss2 and
other non-free audiovisual libs.
-- 
derek