[Aptitude-devel] Bug#683866: aptitude does not have an autoremove command

[Andrew Pimlott]

Excerpts from Daniel Hartwig's message of Sat Aug 04 17:53:08 -0700 2012:
> > aptitude does not have the autoremove command that apt-get has.  There
> > does not appear to be any way to uninstall automatically installed
> > packages from the command line with aptitude.
> 
> Aptitude operates under the principal that you either wish for it to
> manage unused packages, or you do not.  The default is the manage
> unused packages but this can be changed by setting
> Aptitude::Delete-Unused "0".
> 
> When managing unused packages any action will cause their removal:

Thanks for the explanation.  I have had Delete-Unused set to "true"
forever, so I guess I forgot that this is the default behavior.

> An explicit autoremove command is useful for a user who has
> Delete-Unused set false.  In this case it would be equivalent to:
> 
> # aptitude -oAptitude::Delete-Unused=1 install

Thanks for the tip, that helps me!

> Generally it is not our goal to mirror every function of apt-get, that
> is not particularly useful.  Aptitude is a high-level interface with
> semantics different to the apt-utils: if you need apt-get for a given
> task, use apt-get.

One reason I prefer to do everything with aptitude is its handy log.  If
I switch to apt-get for some operations, some thing are logged and
others are not.  (I do know about dpkg's log.)

Andrew