apt-get autoremove in edgy

[Matthew Kuiken]

Adam Miller wrote:
> Foxy,
>      I was being told that when autoremove was taking things out that 
> their xfce option at gdm wasn't usable anymore because it apparently 
> took everything with it. They said it lists each application one by one 
> and not just say its removing xubuntu-desktop.
> 
> -Adam
> 

Are you sure they weren't using aptitude?  That sounds like a certain 
feature that aptitude uses to ensure that unused libraries aren't left 
on a system when you uninstall a program.  Aptitude keeps track of the 
packages that you explicitly install, and which ones were drug in as 
dependencies of others.  If you remove all the packages that depend on a 
library, it removes the library with the last application that used it.

If the person in question installed xubuntu-desktop with aptitude, and 
then removed a sub-package, thus removing xubuntu-desktop, all the 
packages that had xubuntu-desktop as the only thing that depended upon 
them would also be removed.

-Matt