Aptitude wants to remove "ubuntu-desktop"

[Derek Broughton]

Francisco Borges wrote:

> » On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 11:00AM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> > Optimally, there should be some "soft" dependency scheme, which is what
>> > I think what "suggests" was supposed to mean, except that I never saw
>> > "suggests" working in any meaningful way.
>>
>> "suggests" is so soft it's squishy :-)  "Recommends" is something like
>> that,
>> in so far as aptitude installs those by default.  Too bad you can't tell
>> it you don't want the recommends for a single package (I tried to install
>> eclipse with just the full dependencies, and aptitude tried to remove
>> every other "recommends" package).
> 
... 
> About this problem you just mentioned, you need to set
> Recommends-Important to false and keep Keep-Recommends as true:

Perhaps, but that would be a little awkward to do on a per-package basis. 
Perhaps, if I force Keep-Recommends in the apt options, and use the -R
option on the command line.  I'll look further.  It's far from intuitive -
but then that's the problem with aptitude.  It's been quite the learning
curve (and I still won't touch that gui!).

> They *should* be using Recommends in these *-desktops packages and not
> depends. But AFAIK (correct if wrong) apt-get does /not/ handle
> "Recommends:" properly

or, at all :-)  I'm not sure what that would buy.  If you installed
ubuntu-desktop, but not its recommended packages, you wouldn't be offered
any of the new packages on upgrade - so just the same as removing the
desktop package.
-- 
derek