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

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 14 November 2012 18:03, Elmar S. Heeb <elmar at heebs.ch> wrote:
> BTW, I am fine with either behaviour but I would strongly vote for a
> consistent policy between apt and aptitude.

In future versions aptitude will adopt apt-get's behaviour.

> However +m is not a supported action (as
> opposed to +M).

Oh, yes.  I suppose that when “+M” was introduced, “+m” would have
been equivalent to “+”, but that situation has long since changed.
With the new behaviour, “+m” (install and mark manual) would again be
the same as “+”.

>
>> 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.

Indeed.  The interactive processing is different, with auto-removals
processed immediately.  It is equivalent to:

# aptitude remove --schedule-only rsstail
# aptitude install --schedule-only openssl
# aptitude install

For various reasons, the semantics must be different here than when
specifying all actions at once.

Regards