[Aptitude-devel] Bug#638049: Bug#638049: aptitude forgets which packages were installed automatically

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi all,

2016-02-26 11:34 matthias.hinkfoth2 at uni-rostock.de:
>Hi Harri,
>
>I experiance the overall problem of forgetting about automatically
>installed packages every now and then on several machines and with
>various versions of aptitude from 0.4.?? up to 0.6.11. Unfortunately,
>I was unable to find a pattern in aptitude's behaviour.

That's likely not one cause but multiple problems with similar
manifestations.  I've been fixing some of those cases in the 0.7.x
series, but there are other cases still remaining.  There were 20~30
reports with many merged bugs (sometimes wrongly) and still about a
dozen or so remain.

>But I suspect
>a different bug to be related: If I uninstall a package, aptitude
>sometimes wants to reinstall that package immediatly.

Actually, this sounds more like these:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570492
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814996


>> Maybe its best to forbid making changes in the preview?
>I do not think so. My use case of the preview is similar to a
>filtered package view.
>
>> The implied changes (esp. new dependencies, if you manually add some
>> of the recommended packages) are not completely visible in the
>> preview, anyway.
>Yes. I think this is unfortunate. My workaround, after making changes
>is, to close the preview and reopen it.
>
>A suggestion:
>The preview is a preview as long as you do not
>- change the package selection,
>- update the package database,
>- ...

I use the preview in a similar way, and I don't know if everybody does,
but also I don't think that forbidding changes in the preview is going
to be very popular.


>If you change anything, the preview should become a normal package
>view, and accepting the changes should open a new preview.
>
>Happily enough, I do not know how hard it is to implement that, but
>from a user's point of view, this is what should happen.
>
>Any comments are welcome.

Could be a good idea.

I think that this belongs better in a new bug report, would you mind to
submit a new bug to discuss this separately?


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>