Aptitude--any users!

[James Freer]

I've never been quite sure how many folk use aptitude compared with Apt-get.

Having used ubuntu for 4 years now i have always found that it handles
removal very much better than Synaptic or apt-get. Apt-get's
autoremove i didn't find removed all dependencies and config files.

Recently looking at the aptitude man file i realised i'd overlooked
the 'purge' option. My understanding of aptitude was that IF used for
ALL installs it remembers files and thus on removal removes all  - in
practice i've found it does this. So what does the purge option do?
What instances would this be useful for.

thanks
james