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

[Francesco Poli]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:07:50 +0200 Harald Dunkel wrote:

[...]
> It seems that aptitude forgets the automatic flag sometimes.
> This problem seems to be related to resolving dependency
> conflicts, but I don't know how to reproduce it yet. Its a
> pretty painful bug, because cleaning up the mess is manual,
> error-prone work.

I have been experiencing this same bug (or, at least, a very similar
one) for several months on my Debian testing boxes.
It continues to show up, from time to time.

For instance, when I purged the gnome-* packages I had manually
installed, I found tens of gnome libraries that were not automatically
purged (or removed) and I am sure I have never manually installed those
libraries!

I also noticed that sometimes, aptitude says it will purge some
packages, but actually leaves them installed (even though scheduled for
purging), as in:

  $ aptitude search ~i | grep ^.p | cut -c 1-35
  ip  autotools-dev                  
  ip  hwdata                         
  ip  libavahi-gobject0              
  ip  libexiv2-9                     
  ip  libgnome-desktop-2-17

I am sure I have never manually installed these packages.
I will have to manually purge them, to have them actually purged!

I am not sure if this is related to the other issue.

Please note that I always use aptitude from the command line:

 # aptitude install list_of_interesting_packages
 # aptitude update
 # aptitude --purge-unused safe-upgrade
 # aptitude --purge-unused purge list_of_unwanted_packages 

and so forth.


After searching on the BTS, it seems to me that there are a good number
of bug reports about issues with the auto flag:

http://bugs.debian.org/368037
http://bugs.debian.org/432017
http://bugs.debian.org/490547
http://bugs.debian.org/495711
http://bugs.debian.org/508428
http://bugs.debian.org/561747
http://bugs.debian.org/590308
http://bugs.debian.org/613276
http://bugs.debian.org/637257
http://bugs.debian.org/638049   <-- this is the one I am commenting
http://bugs.debian.org/658894
http://bugs.debian.org/667750
http://bugs.debian.org/670153

I don't know why these reports are not merged together.
Maybe they do not describe the same exact bug (even though, after
reading all the bug histories, they still look the same issue to me...).

I chose to comment one of the most recently reported bug, in the hope
to catch the one that is really about the issue I am experiencing
myself.


Dear Aptitude Development Team, what can be done to fix this annoying
bug (which I would consider more of severity important, than normal)?

Please help!
Thanks for your time (and for developing my favorite package manager!).



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