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

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo


Hi Harald,

2011-08-16 21:07 Harald Dunkel:
>
>(I'd love to have some option in aptitude to mark all
>installed packages as automatically installed, except
>for those that do not appear on the Depends or Recommends
>list of any installed package. This would make the use
>of some high level meta packages much more interesting.)

This can be done with patterns.


2013-03-16 18:24 Harald Dunkel:
>Hi Daniel,
>
>I found a procedure to reproduce the problem by installing
>and removing postgresql. Here is the script:
>[...]
>
>After running it I've got 2 new libraries that should have been removed
>automatically:
>
>Aptitude doesn't show the automatic flag for these libs.

I tried to reproduce this by installing postgresql and also firebird.
postgresql did not install any libs, but pulled in other deps, all of
which were removed when postgresql was.  firebird pulled other deps,
including libs, which were removed as well.

No other packages that I had marked as auto were modified in the course
of these operations.

I cannot say if other possible operations do not produce the effects
that you describe, but at least it does not happen in all cases.  The
merged bug reports are all from the same period many years ago, with
similar versions from aptitude and for sure apt -- both of which have
seen many fixes and changes in the last few years, and I am fixing other
cases for the next release of cases where the auto-installed flag was
removed from aptitude.

Some of the merged bug reports and their messages are not very specific
or indicate problems with python-aptdaemon and possibly apt-get instead,
some of which have been addressed.

Did you keep an eye on this and saw this happening recently?


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>