[Aptitude-devel] Bug#693144: aptitude should honour explicit installation request in connection with markauto package

[Elmar S. Heeb]

Hello

On 11/14/2012 03:02 AM, Daniel Hartwig wrote:
> Note that you can not request of aptitude that a package “remains
> installed”.  You can only request to install, remove, mark manual
> (hint!), etc..  At best, the closest option is “keep”, however, that
> will not work in the example you describe.

Sorry for being vague in my wording.  With "remains installed" I just
wanted to point out the explicit install action that is specified on the
command line.  But anyway, we agree on that issue.

> In the past, it was considered convenient to allow users to upgrade
> packages using “aptitude install foo”, without altering the
> auto-installed state.  However, current apt thinking is that “install”
> should always mark the requested packages as manually installed.  That
> is the default behaviour in libapt-pkg, as used by apt-get, etc..

This puzzled me initially too but as soon as I realized that an install
request does not change the auto-installed state I had no problem with
this behaviour.  This was in fact the motivation to specify a package
explicitly on the command line which would otherwise be autoremoved.

BTW, I am fine with either behaviour but I would strongly vote for a
consistent policy between apt and aptitude.

> What you really want is to mark it as manually installed:
> 
> # aptitude install rsstail- openssl&m

I am aware of this option.  I don't like it because I have to issue a
different command depending on whether openssl is installed or not.  If
I could run

   aptitude install rsstail- openssl+m

it would solve my problem.  However +m is not a supported action (as
opposed to +M).

> The request to install openssl is not ignored, although it has no
> effect, because aptitude processes that install request *before* it
> decides to remove packages that are no longer required.

Interestingly, the interactive behaviour is different here from the one
on the command line.  If I hit '-' on rsstail and the '+' on openssl it
would keep openssl and mark it as manually installed.

Regards,     -- Elmar


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