[Aptitude-devel] Bug#638049: Bug#638049: aptitude forgets which packages were installed automatically

[matthias.hinkfoth2 at uni-rostock.de]

Hi Harri,

I experiance the overall problem of forgetting about automatically
installed packages every now and then on several machines and with
various versions of aptitude from 0.4.?? up to 0.6.11. Unfortunately,
I was unable to find a pattern in aptitude's behaviour. But I suspect
a different bug to be related: If I uninstall a package, aptitude
sometimes wants to reinstall that package immediatly.

> Maybe its best to forbid making changes in the preview?
I do not think so. My use case of the preview is similar to a
filtered package view.

> The implied changes (esp. new dependencies, if you manually add some
> of the recommended packages) are not completely visible in the
> preview, anyway.
Yes. I think this is unfortunate. My workaround, after making changes
is, to close the preview and reopen it.

A suggestion:
The preview is a preview as long as you do not
- change the package selection,
- update the package database,
- ...
If you change anything, the preview should become a normal package
view, and accepting the changes should open a new preview.

Happily enough, I do not know how hard it is to implement that, but
from a user's point of view, this is what should happen.

Any comments are welcome.

Regards,
Matthias