[Bug 1725861] Re: APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false" should be the default

[Steve Langasek]

On Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 12:04:01AM -0000, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> Because let's face it: If A suggests B, B provides or modifies
> functionality for A, so removing B might just break your use case of A.

That is absolutely not apt's responsibility to handle, when the admin has
never indicated to the package manager that they want to keep B; and is
nothing when weighed against the asymmetry that causes package cruft to be
kept around on every user's systems after upgrade.

A user who discovers after autoremovals that she wants B installed can
install B from the archive.  But a user who just wants no-longer-needed
packages to be autoremoved has no reasonable way to get this - because
that's what 'autoremove' is supposed to imply already, but it doesn't
actually deliver unless you track down this non-obvious apt setting and
tweak your config.

If 'apt install A=1; apt install A=2; apt autoremove --purge' gives
different results than 'apt install A=2; apt autoremove --purge', then that
is a bug.  Sometimes it's a bug in a package.  In this case, it's a bug in
the package manager.

The current behavior is not a sensible default.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1725861

Title:
  APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false" should be the default

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  After an upgrade to 17.10, I took a look at how much cruft I had
  accumulated on my system, and started marking various packages 'auto'
  which I know I don't care about keeping installed.

  apt autoremove didn't remove nearly as much stuff as I expected, and
  as I dug down into some of them I found that a number of them were
  being kept because other packages on the system have Suggests:
  referencing them.

  This is asymmetric and wrong.  If Suggested packages are not
  automatically installed by default, then a Suggests should also not
  prevent a package from being automatically removed.

  After a web search led me to 'https://askubuntu.com/questions/351085
  /how-to-remove-recommended-and-suggested-dependencies-of-uninstalled-
  packages', I set 'APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false"' in my
  apt config; apt autoremove now wants to remove 365MiB of packages from
  my system.  That is a LOT of cruft that has accumulated over the years
  of upgrades, none of which I have ever asked to be installed and all
  of which were universe or no-longer-available packages.

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