deborphan risks ? ( was Re: Deinstall package *INCLUDING* all dependencies)

[Nikhil Fernandes]

On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 12:15 +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Jul 2006 19:30:38 -0500
> "Christofer C. Bell" <christofer.c.bell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to confirm the conservatism of deborphan because when I run
> > it, I get this:
> > 
> > cbell at circe:~$ deborphan
> > gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
> > gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
> > gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
> > gstreamer0.10-pitfdll
> > cbell at circe:~$
> > 
> > None of these start with lib and while I think it'd be great to remove
> > libs that nothing depends on, but it's looking like deborphan (as I
> > see here, run without any "human eyes paying attention") will
> > eventually peel off every package on the machine like an onion.
> 
> Hmm - it *does* look suspect to me. For example, I'm sure ' sound-juicer"
> doesn't depend on "bad and ugly"  gstreamer plugins,
> 
> apt-cache depends sound-juicer
> [snipped output to reflect only gstreamer stuff]
> 
>  Depends: gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
>   Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-base
>  |Depends: gstreamer0.10-alsa
>   Depends: <gstreamer0.10-audiosink>
>     gstreamer0.10-alsa
>     gstreamer0.10-esd
>     gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
>   Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
> 
>  but...  if you want to use it to rip to mp3 rather than, say, ogg, and you
> uninstall the packages deborphan spits out, you might get an unpleasant
> surprise next time you try to rip to mp3...
> 
> In my case deborphan includes
>  gstreamer-10-ugly-multiverse
> 
> which is the key to using sound-juicer as an mp3 ripper. I certainly won't
> be uninstalling it, since I sometimes need to make mp3s and sound-juicer
> does it well - not everyone has an ogg player, despite the fact that I
> personally prefer to use ogg, and generally use that format on my
> machines...
> 
> So deborphan requires supervision, indeed.
> 
> Or have I misunderstood something?
> 
> Peter

I think the answer might be in this thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=211466&highlight=deborphan

Basically, all these multimedia packages don't explicitly depend on the
gstreamer-ugly and gstreamer-bad packages, but if you want the extra
functionality you'll need them. The deborphan command has options to add
packages to a keep-back list, so it won't report them.

Nikhil