[Aptitude-devel] Bug#776785: Bug#776785: aptitude: Fails to mark dependencies as automatically installed in Curses UI

[Zane Peralta]

Thanks for your thorough response.

You were right, almost all the manual packages are metapackages and the 
rest oldlibs.
I've commented out the Never-MarkAuto-Sections section in 01autoremove 
and that seems to give me the behavior that I want.

On 01.02.2015 20:13, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Control: tag -1 + moreinfo
>
> Hi,
>
> Zane Peralta wrote:
>> Aptitude fails to mark *some* dependencies as automatically
>> installed when selecting a package in the Curses UI and pressing +
>> (to install).
>>
>> I selected "kde-full" for installation and it marked other packages,
>> such as kde-standard, for manual installation as well. The expected
>> outcome is, of course, that the dependencies be marked as
>> automatically installed.
> Yes and no. You may expect that, but at least in the case of kde-full,
> this is actually a wanted feature enabled by default:
>
> Dependecies of packages in the sections metapackages and oldlibs are
> configured to not automatically become marked as "automatically
> installed".
>
> See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756816#27 for
> the reasoning behind that behaviour.
>
> You should be able to change this behaviour in
> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove in the APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections
> section. APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections so far is only documented in
> /usr/share/doc/apt/examples/configure-index.gz
>
> I've filed a bug report about documenting APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections
> properly in the man page apt.conf(5) at https://bugs.debian.org/776790
>
>> It *appears* to me that it's the "hard" dependencies that are
>> correctly marked as automatically installed, and the recommendations
>> that are marked as manual (but this may be a red herring).
> I doubt that. I suspect APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections to be reason.
>
>> I couldn't attach my state bundle because at 37MB it exceeds the
>> attachment size accepted by reportbug.
> No need to do that at the moment.
>
> Please check if all packages whose dependencies were not marked as
> "automatically installed" are in the sections "metapackages" or
> "oldlibs".
>
> If that's the case, I'd just close that bug report.
>
> Alternatively, if you're not happy with that, I can imagine two other
> options:
>
> * Reassign the bug report to apt to show that there are more users
>    than just me unhappy with that default setting. I though doubt that
>    this will help much.
>
> * Keep it open as wishlist bug to make Aptitude ignore (in a sane and
>    configurable way) APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections, maybe by just
>    honouring Aptitude::Never-MarkAuto-Sections or by creating a new
>    setting named Aptitude::Ignore-Never-MarkAuto-Sections and
>    defaulting to yes.
>
>    Reasoning behind this slightly subversive approach: It seems that
>    primarily aptitude users are unhappy with that setting because of
>    the completely different approach between aptitude and apt-get usage
>    patterns (interactively fine-tune vs one-shot).
>
> If there were also packages from other sections than those listed in
> APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections, then we should keep that bug report as
> is and just remove the "moreinfo" tag again. Then it's a real bug and
> not just a matter of preferences and expectations.
>
> 		Regards, Axel