Aptitude and Recommends [was: wants to remove "ubuntu-desktop"]

[Francisco Borges]

» On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 02:00PM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:

> > 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!).

I think what you need to do is to use "aptitude -o" to explicitly set a
configuration option on one particular invocation.

I checked the GUI, I did something wrong... next thing I know aptitude
thought wanted to remove grub (no joke!)

> > 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.

Now I'm also not sure what that would buy... what I expected it to do
was

1. install kubuntu-desktop with aptitude -> all recommended packages
   also get installed.

2. remove "recommended" package "krap" :-) with aptitude.
2.a aptitude marks krap as explicitly unwanted.
2.b kubuntu-desktop remains installed, since all depends are met, that
    being *the*point* of having "krap" as only a recommended package.

3. Upgrade kubuntu-desktop, everything gets installed or reinstalled but
   not "krap" since it has been explicilty marked as unwanted.

I don't think this is possible, but this seems to be the right way to do
it.

-- 
Francisco