[Aptitude-devel] Bug#661188: Bug#661188: aptitude purge <package> recursively REMOVES BUT DOES NOT PURGE the unneeded dependencies of <package>

[Daniel Hartwig]

retitle 661188 aptitude: recursive remove (like "pacman -Rs")
severity 661188 wishlist
thanks

2012/2/29 Georgiy Treyvus <georgiytreyvus at gmail.com>:
> @Daniel:
>
> The way Arch does it is actually pretty elegant.
>
> Autoremoving is cool don't get me wrong but there are times that you just
> want a recursive remove/purge of a given package.
>
> Sometimes people want do a recursive removal of A but a regular one for B
> because they'll be installing another package with most if not all of the
> same dependencies.
>

Ok, this is a reasonable scenario.  I see this is an advantage over
marking dependencies as manually installed, however, given that the user
knows they wish to install C, this is more-or-less covered by:

# aptitude remove B C+

which means to remove B and install C at the same time.  Dependencies used
by C which would be "orphaned" by B will be kept in place.

The same can also be done interactively.

Alternatively (and not specifically how you desire this to work), disable
Aptitude::Delete-Unused before removing B, perform any other activities,
then enable it after C is installed.  No orphaned dependencies will be
removed during that period, but such are cleaned up at the end.


In any case, I will leave this open for anyone who wishes to
implement the pacman-style recursive remove.


> Autoremove is a great feature but it should be at the users discretion as in
> Arch.
>

Aptitude::Delete-Unused already puts this at the user's discretion ;-)