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

[Balint Reczey]

@vorlon

> 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.

IMO this is asymmetric and right because the cost of keeping the
packages on the system is much lower than the expected benefits they
provide for the user. Why else would be suggested?

> 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.

IMO 365MiB over _years_ is not a lot at all the age of streaming 4K videos every day. Did you experience any improvement in the system's performance after removing the packages?
I just checked the size of apt's package list cache on an Artful system as a comparison:

 ~$ du -sh /var/lib/apt/lists
 367M	/var/lib/apt/lists

IMO saving a tiny amount of space and surprising people by removing more
packages than before would hardly make the Ubuntu experience better.

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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:
  Opinion
Status in apt source package in Bionic:
  Opinion

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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