[Aptitude-devel] Bug#336833: aptitude: Weak automatic state

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 8 December 2012 20:56, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
<antti-juhani at kaijanaho.fi> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 08, 2012 at 01:05:31PM +0800, Daniel Hartwig wrote:
>> Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <antti-juhani at kaijanaho.fi> wrote:
>> > I'm not really interested in keeping everything that is suggested.
>> > What I am interested in is keeping packages that I selected *because*
>> > they were suggested, as long as the suggestion is in force.  The
>> > suggested "suggested automatic" state would help here.
>>
>> In effect, you wish to make selected relationships stronger, that is,
>> upgrade a particular suggests to recommends or depends.
>
> That's one possible implementation path.  Not the only one, I think.
>
>> This is tracked at [1].
>
> I just read that bug log.  Doesn't sound like what I want, though I suppose it
> could be used to provide what I want.

In effect, is what you are requesting like this:

- “Manually-Installed-Suggests” will keep an auto-installed package;
- “Suggests” will not keep an auto-installed package;

?

>
>> Note that a similar effect can be acheived using a local metapackage
>> that depends on both the main package and the important suggested
>> package.  Then you install just this metapackage, and it takes care to
>> upgrade the dependency for you. [2]
>
> Yeah, which is a lot of work compared to just + M.

Marking the suggested package as auto does not provide the level of
control you request, or do I miss something?