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

[David Kalnischkies]

While that sounds reasonable at first in simple situations, if I follow
that argument, I can find no reason why we are doing complex metapackage
handling, keeping many providers and a lot of other things, so we should
get right of all those, too, should we?

In reality we have to deal with many many users who only very casually
check the output of apt and generally trust it to do the right thing™.
And that is kinda reasonable if we don't want to teach every user
packaging practices. Most users will just not make the connection
between having run autoremove a couple of days ago and suddenly not
being able to push audio files from their favorite player&manager
directly to their phones causing users (and supporters alike) to be
frustrated. Having "too many" packages installed rarely causes that
level of frustration in comparison.

autoremove is just not an "undo". It is supposed to remove things which
are clearly no longer needed by anything. Like old kernels, old
libraries and co. In fact, ideally we should end up in a situation in
which autoremove can be called automatically so that old kernels are
really gone, the system is cleaner after an upgrades and such… (but for
various reasons that isn't really possible/advisable at the moment).

Perhaps we should implement an "undo" – just named differently as that
is too confusing as we can't really perform an undo, but we have the
history.log from which we can extract which packages were newly
installed in an "apt install A" and offer to remove them as well (maybe
with a question ala: those other packages make use of B initially
installed with A, should we keep it?).

(And, while we are at it also a way for a repository to say: I don't
support package A anymore with options among a) you can safely remove it
as something else takes care of it now, b) here are potential
alternatives [we tend to have a list in RM requests, but nothing a user
can look at easily] c) it is dead and nothing compares d) look elsewhere
for it e) … – which should deal with a lot of packages which autoremove
should be removing, but is too scared ATM as it has not enough
information to make a safe call)

[No, I haven't implemented either. I haven't even really thought about
them. It just sounds for me like those could be potential ways to
resolve the situation]

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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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