[Aptitude-devel] Bug#724032: I thought I said install // aptitude: "aptitude install" purges packages instead of updating them

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: fixed -1 aptitude/0.7.3-1
Control: close -1


Hi,

2013-09-22 12:50 jidanni at jidanni.org:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.6.8.2-1.2
>Severity: wishlist
>
>I thought I said install. So I just hit return. Looking closer I see it
>was asking me about removing them.
>
>Well OK, I'm sure it has its logic and mother knows best, but well... never mind.
>
># aptitude search ~U
>i A tcl8.5                          - Tcl (the Tool Command Language) v8.5 - she
>i A tk8.5                           - Tk toolkit for Tcl and X11, v8.5 - windowi
>i A xserver-xorg-core               - Xorg X server - core server
># aptitude install ~U~n8
>The following packages will be REMOVED:
>  tcl8.5{pu} (D: tk8.5)  tk8.5{pu}
>0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
>Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 6,669 kB will be freed.
>Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
>[...]

So among the bugs below (not including merged bugs), fixed in 0.7.3...

  * Remove unneeded automatically installed packages in the same action
    (Closes: #478116, #564545, #637257, #368037, #486454, #738517,
    #789803, #779999, #756507, #759764, #766702, #655483,#740009)

...there were several duplicates from you (maybe some of them were
caused by different underlying problems, but similar enough), including
at least:

  #590308, #637483, 661699, #713906, #779715, #738517, #779999, #756507,
  #759764, #766702

basically saying "installing then purging leaves packages behind",
because istead of removing them in the same "session" that it removed
its reverse-dependencies (packages depending on those removed later), it
was deferring the action for another "session".


Well, so I am happy to report that this is the nth duplicate about this
issue :-)


In the command above, all of the Upgradable packages shown have been
auto-installed, of which tcl8.5 and tk8.5 had not reverse dependencies
and thus are being removed in that session.  xserver-xorg-core
supposedly had rev-depends installed, and thus not removed.

Why hadn't Tcl/Tk packages been removed before?  Because (lib)apt was
not marking them as "garbage", and it was in 0.7.3-1 that I implemented
extra checks in aptitude to try to proactively remove more packages that
apt was not removing at the same time that it removed the packages that
depended on them.

(I don't think that it's a terribly important problem, in fact I think
that it's pretty insignificant, and I think that everybody should
tolerate that aptitude / package-manager-du-jour removes some of the
garbage in the next session instead; but I thought that ~20 reports
about the same problem Ought to be Enough for Anyone and I decided that
I didn't want to get up to 640k about it).

Even if you are asking to install, aptitude was at least clever enough
to detect that they were unused and auto-installed, so it removed it at
the first opportunity, stealing Install's thunder.  Had you requested to
"install ~U" it would have removed the Tcl/Tk ones and would have
upgraded xserver-xorg-core.


So, in summary, I am still more happy to report that we can close this
bug now as another duplicate of the ones above.


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