[Aptitude-devel] Bug#724032: Bug#724032: I thought I said install

Axel Beckert abe at debian.org
Sun Sep 22 13:18:48 BST 2013


Control: retitle -1 aptitude: "aptitude install" purges packages instead of updating them
Control: tag -1 + moreinfo

Hi,

jidanni at jidanni.org wrote:
> I thought I said install. So I just hit return. Looking closer I see it
> was asking me about removing them.

Because they were marked as "automatically installed" (the "u" means
"unused"). Aptitude removes such packages automatically.

IIRC apt-get marks packages upgraded with "apt-get install"
automatically as manually installed despite it doesn't allow
parameters to "apt-get upgrade" or "apt-get dist-upgrade" like
aptitude does.

So I wonder if aptitude should automatically mark packages passed to
"aptitude install" as parameter as manually installed as apt-get does
(which would change the behaviour in this case) while not doing so on
packages passed to "aptitude safe-upgrade" or "aptitude dist-upgrade"
as parameters to still allow users to decide if they want this
behaviour or not.

I would prefer to keep the current behaviour, but mostly because I'm
used to it and I'm using it that way, but as pointed out above the
logic is debatable. IIRC aptitude-robot partially relies (or at least
relied on it in the past) on that logic, too.

> Well OK, I'm sure it has its logic and mother knows best, but
> well... never mind.

It has, but it's strange anyway. Do you mix aptitude and apt-get? Did
you upgrade or remove other packages which depend on Tcl/Tk with
apt-get or dpkg instead of aptitude.

Because I would have expected that aptitude would have removed these
packages already when its dependencies vanished. Then again, aptitude
sometimes notices that reverse dependencies are gone only in a second
run (IIRC there is a bug-report for that somewhere), so if this was a
run just after a removal or upgrade run which changed Tcl/Tk's reverse
dependencies, it could have been an incarnation of that bug.

Do you remember what package actions you did before the removal
happened?

> # aptitude search ~U
> i A tcl8.5                          - Tcl (the Tool Command Language) v8.5 - she
> i A tk8.5                           - Tk toolkit for Tcl and X11, v8.5 - windowi
> i A xserver-xorg-core               - Xorg X server - core server
> # aptitude install ~U~n8
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   tcl8.5{pu} (D: tk8.5)  tk8.5{pu}

With regards to the purging ("p"), do you have requested to
automatically purge all removed packages?

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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