[kwlug-disc] Purging already removed Debian packages.

[Chris Irwin]

On Fri, 2010-05-14 at 16:00 -0400, Chris Frey wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 02:16:55PM -0400, Chris Irwin wrote:
> > A nice feature of aptitude is that it will perform an autoremove of
> > unneccessary packages. So if you install MyApp, and it requires
> > libMyApp, aptitude will also remove the library (as long as nothing
> > else needs it). apt-get would simply leave the library around to
> > clutter up your system, unless you manually sought them out.
> 
> My version of apt-get has an 'autoremove' command too.

Yes, but apt-get's autoremove is not automatic.. ;) It must be manually
run. Most folks are not aware of it's existance.

Synaptic (a gtk+ gui front-end for apt) has an 'auto-removable' section
in the "Status" view. Pretty much nobody examines it.

> I think these things work in such a way, that the tools record which
> apps that you actively select, and which ones that just got included
> as a dependency.  It's the dependencies that get removed automatically.
> Which means that if you did an "apt-get install library", then that
> library won't get removed.

That is correct, there is a notion of automatic or manual install.
Manually installed packages will never be automatically removed.

-- 
Chris Irwin
e:  chris at chrisirwin.ca
w: http://chrisirwin.ca
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