APT Is Nagging Me To Remove Things I Don't Want To Remove

[Derek Broughton]

Michael Leone wrote:

> On 1/26/08, Donn <donn.ingle at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You could also try:
>> sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
>> and see what it does.
>>
>> Then there is:
>> sudo aptitude full-upgrade
>>
>> One should not mix apt-get and aptitude,
> 
> Why Not? Not saying I don't believe you, just that I don't understand
> why it would be bad. Doesn't aptitude just extend the apt-get, by
> following the "Recommends" tags as well?

Actually, you're probably closer to the truth than I would have thought. 
That didn't used to be the case.  When aptitude was created, apt-get
_never_ removed packages that had only been installed as dependencies, and
aptitude introduced an extra level of dependency checking so that it could
do that.  But back then, Dave couldn't have seen the situation he did -
because apt-get would never have been suggesting removing packages.  We
used to use deborphan for that.  Obviously apt-get now does some of this,
but equally obviously, it doesn't do it the same way as aptitude (or Dave
wouldn't have seen the same problem with aptitude that he had already fixed
with apt-get).

As for "Recommends", that's just a (default) option.  Aptitude doesn't
necessarily install "Recommends", though for some unknown reason it's all
or nothing - I can't use that as the default, but for some particular
package (like eclipse where I _don't_ want all the -gcj packages) turn it
off.  If I try: "aptitude -R install eclipse", it won't try to install the
gcj packages but it will try to remove every _other_ recommended package!
-- 
derek