[Aptitude-devel] Bug#816497: aptitude: problems with (un)markauto

[Jörg-Volker Peetz]

Hi Manual,

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote on 03/03/16 02:57:
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
> 
> 
> Hi Jörg,
> 
<snip>
> 
> Seems to work fine around here:
> 
>  # aptitude -F '%M %p' search '~n^gnupg2$~ramd64'
>  A gnupg2
> 
>  # aptitude markauto '~n^gnupg2$~ramd64'
>  No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
>  0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 92 not upgraded.
>  Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
> 
>  # aptitude -F '%M %p' search '~n^gnupg2$~ramd64'
>  A gnupg2
> 
>  # aptitude unmarkauto '~n^gnupg2$~ramd64'
>  No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
>  0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 92 not upgraded.
>  Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
> 
>  # aptitude -F '%M %p' search '~n^gnupg2$~ramd64'
>    gnupg2
> 
thanks for looking into this. I should've been more specific.

On my system the output stays unchanged and always says:

# aptitude -F '%M %p' search '~n^gnupg2$~ramd64'
A gnupg2

And I think the difference is that on my system the package gnupg2 has the
additional new attribute "Auto-New-Install" set to "yes" in the file
/var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates.
Indeed, for any package with this new attribute in var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
"aptitude (un)markauto" doesn't work.
For a package without this new attribute "(un)markauto" still works here.

Regarding the interaction between aptitude and apt-mark, I thought that at least
the (un)markauto actions of aptitude were written to the apt database.

Best regards,
Jörg-Volker.