[Aptitude-devel] Bug#579071: aptitude: Recommends-Important and Suggests-Important do not work

[Daniel Hartwig]

Control: reassign -1 aptitude-doc-en 0.6.2.1-2
Control: retitle -1 aptitude-doc-en: Apt::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant really has no hyphen
Control: severity -1 normal
Control: user aptitude-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
Control: usertags -1 - auto-installed

Hello

There are two issues at play here: incorrectly documented option names
and clearing the auto-installed flag when a package is marked for
removal.

Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo at scientia.net> wrote:
> It seems that Apt::AutoRemove::Recommends-Important and
> Apt::AutoRemove::Suggests-Important do not work.

The aptitude user's manual incorrectly refers to those names when they
should be without the hyphen: RecommendsImportant and SuggestsImportant.

Based on your follow-up:
> It seems that when using the deprecated options (which should be
> synonyms according to the manual):
> aptitude::Keep-Recommends "true";
> aptitude::Keep-Suggests "true";
> that the issue described in this bug happens less often....

I'd say that using the correct names would have been better as well.

>
> I've observed many many different cases, where aptitude _clears_
> the "A" flag (and wants to remove the respective packages, if that
> is configured) even though there are still non-A-packages which
> suggest or recommend the respective packages.
> I've even thought that I found some packages where the flag
> was deleted in the depend-case, but I cannot find these examples
> right now.
>
> I've set the priority to important, as this bug means more or less
> loss of data, namely the information which packages were
> automatically installed (the A flag).

What is happening is that aptitude marks them for removal, which also
clears the auto-installed flag (“A”).  This flag is not restored if you
subsequently cancel the removal.  See [1] and [2] which are more-or-less
the same thing (and a fix to those will correct the behaviour you see
here).

Repurposing this report to be specifically about the incorrect
documentation.  Suggest you subscribe to either of the other reports to
stay updated on that issue.

Regards

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/508428
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/537735