[Aptitude-devel] Bug#848011: Bug#848011: aptitude doesn't ask for confirmation of removal for "markauto", leading to surprise removals

[Axel Beckert]

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tag -1 + wontfix

Hi,

Alexey Kopytko wrote:
> Before 0.8.3 aptitude asked if one wants to remove a package if
> marked as autoinstalled. 

It still does, as you reported yourself:

> $ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
> Resolving dependencies...                
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   foo{u} 
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 10 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 44,9 kB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] 
[...]
> Consider that you want to mark a list of packages as autoinstalled. Now if you type:
> 
> aptitude markauto foo bar baz
> 
> Every package from the list for which there's no "why" found will be silently, with no 
> indications whatsoever, scheduled for removal.

Exactly. It's only _scheduled_ for removal, but no more immediately
removed as the subcommand name "markauto" suggests. Hence no more
questions at that point. (Which should actually come handy if you're
scripting stuff.)

> If you were doing this from a script, or
> just copying and pasting code from somewhere, you'll be in trouble.

Not at all. In contrary: Now you can script that without needing to
immediately removing the package.

Please read line 6 ff. of aptitude's NEWS file:
https://sources.debian.net/src/aptitude/0.8.3-1/NEWS/#L6

If you insist on the old behaviour, you can call e.g. "aptitude
markauto … && aptitude install" ("aptitude install" without any
further parameter) as a workaround.

> Next time you happen to install updates, unbeknownst to you some of
> the packages above will be removed

No, that happens as you demanded it. There's no surprise at all -- it
just does what you asked for -- and it even asks!

Marking this as wontfix for now as the introduced changed fixed
several (!) other bug reports, see especially #142699:

https://bugs.debian.org/142699
https://bugs.debian.org/567079
https://bugs.debian.org/764299

Manuel: In case you see any chance to add the old behaviour as
optional feature/backwards compatibility flag (e.g. --immediately),
feel free to remove the wontfix tag. (Then again, there's an easy
workaround to get the old behaviour as shown above...)

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