[Aptitude-devel] Bug#366520: Bug#366520: aptitude: please consider implementing "uninstall on sight" option

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
> >Using debfoster, I have some packages like strace or tcpdump marked in
> >a way that the packages are uninstalled whenever debfoster is invoked.
> >This is a very handy way to get rid of packages that tend to get
> >installed on productive systems for debugging while nobody bothers to
> >remove them afterwards.
> >
> >debfoster is going to be removed from Debian,

10 years later, debfoster is still in Debian. :-)

> >losing this
> >functionality. Please consider implementing persistent package states,
> >which survive manual package state changes. That way, I'd like to have
> >tcpdump maked as "to be uninstalled" even if it just was manually
> >installed.
> 
> I don't know if this was possible back in 2006, but nowadays and for
> many years one can mark packages to remove/purge, and then quit
> aptitude, and the state will be saved / "scheduled" -- it persists, as
> requested here.
> 
> The next time that one starts aptitude, it will be marked in the same
> way, and some actions in the command line will have scheduled actions
> into account.

Exactly. And that can also be done from the commandline:

aptitude remove --schedule-only strace tcpdump

So IMHO the solution is to schedule a cron job, e.g. via
/etc/cron.weekly/ which schedules the removal of some packages as
shown above.

		Regards, Axel
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