[Aptitude-devel] why does not aptitude purge rather than just remove packages.

[Daniel Hartwig]

2012/3/13 shirish शिरीष <shirishag75 at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> Sorry for touching an oldish thread (couple of weeks old). Today I had
> time and tried few things :-
>

Hi Shirish

> $ aptitude search ?config-files
>
> c   libmarblewidget11                                   - Marble globe
> widget library
>  $ dpkg-query --showformat='${Conffiles}\n' --show libmarblewidget11
>
>
> $

>  /var/lib/dpkg/info$ cat libmarblewidget11.list
> $
>
> As can be seen it is empty/contains nothing.
>
> $ cat libmarblewidget11.postrm
> #!/bin/sh
> set -e
> # Automatically added by dh_makeshlibs
> if [ "$1" = "remove" ]; then
>        ldconfig
> fi
> # End automatically added section
>
> just says something about ldconfig (which if I understand correctly is
> used to link shared libraries) so basically nothing's there.
>

Correct; there is nothing in postrm that is left to do.  Dpkg is not
able to determine that effectively hence the package remains in the
removed-but-not-purged state.

In this case the package has no files left on the system except those
under /var/lib/dpkg.  Purging the package will remove them, you should
not attempt to remove them manually.


> Another point to note. It seems that neither '$ aptitude search
> ?config-files' nor $ aptitude search ~c is documented anywhere either
> in the man-page or in the help
>

Those places only document the command line interface.  Full
documentation is available in the package aptitude-doc-en, or one of
it's peers.


> Maybe I should file a bug, anybody ?
>

Everything looks fine to me.


Some other places which may be more informative for you:

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/
[2] http://forums.debian.net/
[3] http://www.debian.org/support#irc


Regards