deborphan risks ? ( was Re: Deinstall package *INCLUDING* all dependencies)

[Peter Garrett]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006 19:30:38 -0500
"Christofer C. Bell" <christofer.c.bell at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like to confirm the conservatism of deborphan because when I run
> it, I get this:
> 
> cbell at circe:~$ deborphan
> gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
> gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
> gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
> gstreamer0.10-pitfdll
> cbell at circe:~$
> 
> None of these start with lib and while I think it'd be great to remove
> libs that nothing depends on, but it's looking like deborphan (as I
> see here, run without any "human eyes paying attention") will
> eventually peel off every package on the machine like an onion.

Hmm - it *does* look suspect to me. For example, I'm sure ' sound-juicer"
doesn't depend on "bad and ugly"  gstreamer plugins,

apt-cache depends sound-juicer
[snipped output to reflect only gstreamer stuff]

 Depends: gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
  Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-base
 |Depends: gstreamer0.10-alsa
  Depends: <gstreamer0.10-audiosink>
    gstreamer0.10-alsa
    gstreamer0.10-esd
    gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
  Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good

 but...  if you want to use it to rip to mp3 rather than, say, ogg, and you
uninstall the packages deborphan spits out, you might get an unpleasant
surprise next time you try to rip to mp3...

In my case deborphan includes
 gstreamer-10-ugly-multiverse

which is the key to using sound-juicer as an mp3 ripper. I certainly won't
be uninstalling it, since I sometimes need to make mp3s and sound-juicer
does it well - not everyone has an ogg player, despite the fact that I
personally prefer to use ogg, and generally use that format on my
machines...

So deborphan requires supervision, indeed.

Or have I misunderstood something?

Peter