[Bug 1734104] Re: 'upgrade' in bionic should by default autoremove as well

[Julian Andres Klode]

automatic autoremoval is a difficult topic with a lot of things to
consider:

* autoremoval is not safe to do. Users often end up removing a lot of
stuff they don't want to remove. So this needs careful checking.
(dist-)Upgrades already have long output and people miss removals
already, adding automatic removals makes them even more likely to miss
things.

* The packages being autoremoved are not necessarily related to the
package changes being performed at the moment. You could have removed a
package at some point and your next upgrade let's say a week later
removes all dependencies of the package - that's just seems like bad
user experience to me.

* apt upgrade is defined to not remove packages - that is, it is safe to
run with the guarantee of not losing any functionality. autoremove there
would break that promise and thus expectations. For {full,dist-upgrade}.


So, I don't think we should just switch on autoremovals by default.

We should first focus on the aspects where it really matters:

* If you install an app via gnome-software and remove it, its
dependencies should be gone too (but not other unused packages, as said
before, that would be bad UX).

* When doing release upgrades, remove all unused packages. There's a
huge amount of churn and people expect stuff to be broken / missing
after a release upgrade anyway, so there's much less frustation.

(both have their own LP bugs, but I don't know which ATM)

Also we could do that gnome-software idea of a limited autoremove and
push that to apt too and do that on remove/install/dist-upgrade.
"upgrade" really is kind of a special case, though.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1734104

Title:
  'upgrade' in bionic should by default autoremove as well

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  In bionic, apt upgrade should also autoremove by default. I have a few
  bionic systems (upgrades from xenial mostly) which are not yet showing
  that behaviour, it may be we haven't implemented that yet so this is
  just a placeholder bug in that case :)

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