[Aptitude-devel] Bug#713906: autoinstall packages persist after purge

[jidanni at jidanni.org]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.6.9.1-1

# aptitude -o APT::Install-Recommends=true install alsa-utils
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  alsa-base{a} (R: alsa-utils) (for alsa-utils)  alsa-utils
# aptitude -o APT::Install-Recommends=true purge alsa-utils
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  alsa-utils{p}

Maybe it's because the two mutually recommend each other.

Anyway here's my conf settings

APT::Default-Release "experimental";//just order them in sources.list UNTRUE
APT::Cache::AllVersions false;
APT::Clean-Installed false;
APT::Get::Purge true;
APT::Install-Recommends false;
Aptitude::CmdLine::Always-Prompt true;
Aptitude::Purge-Unused true;
Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Why true;//511230 at bugs.debian.org
Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Deps true;//587582 at bugs.debian.org

No amount fiddling
# aptitude -o APT::Install-Recommends=true -o Apt::AutoRemove::InstallRecommends=true purge alsa-utils
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  alsa-utils{p}

helps.

P.S. the man page says
       -R, --without-recommends
           Do not treat recommendations as dependencies when installing new
           packages (this overrides settings in /etc/apt/apt.conf and
           ~/.aptitude/config). Packages previously installed due to
           recommendations will not be removed.

           This corresponds to the pair of configuration options
           Apt::Install-Recommends and Apt::AutoRemove::InstallRecommends.

       -r, --with-recommends
           Treat recommendations as dependencies when installing new packages
           (this overrides settings in /etc/apt/apt.conf and
           ~/.aptitude/config).

           This corresponds to the configuration option
           Apt::Install-Recommends

But then oddly doesn't explain why Apt::AutoRemove::InstallRecommends is
not affected by the latter.

Also when you say 'corresponds' you should say if it corresponds to
setting them false or true. Same with all the others on the man page.

P.S. reading
file:///usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/ch02s02s06.html
Managing automatically installed packages
it seems like my assumptions in line with what it says...
so something is wrong.

Anyway please tell me how I can now clean up all the
aptitude search ~M
packages that even
deborphan --guess-all
can't detect shouldn't still be there.

OK I have an idea, I set up a batch simple job:
aptitude search ~M
to get their names,
and then for each one
do aptitude why.
And then if grep can only find the words Recommends etc. and not Depends,
then I probably want to purge it so it is put in the final list.

Then after my batch job has made the list, I do
set `cat list`; for i do aptitude purge $i; done
to interactively see if I want to purge each one.

And hope the bug gets fixed so I don't ever have to do that manually again.