[Aptitude-devel] Bug#397728: aptitude should purge deleted packages at the end

[Vincent Lefevre]

Hi,

On 2016-05-04 20:20:59 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
> 2006-11-09 01:33 Vincent Lefevre:
> > One may want to mark deleted packages as purge to get rid of obsolete
> > configuration files. But some configuration files may be common to a
> > package to be purged and a package to installed (this is the case when
> > a package is renamed). To avoid losing the contents of these files
> > (when the user has modified them), the actual purge should occur after
> > installing all the packages.
> 
> aptitude passes the information from a high-level point of view from
> (lib)apt to dpkg, and they decide what to do between them depending on
> complex sets of rules of who-depends-on-what.
> 
> aptitude doesn't intervine directly in that process, so it cannot do
> much, sorry.  Closing as +wontfix.
> 
> I think that the cases that you mention has to be handled specially by
> the package being renamed, to preserve the information from before.  If
> old and new packages share config files, probably this is handled
> specially by dpkg.

You mean something like a dpkg transaction? Wouldn't this be a bug in
dpkg, then? (But this bug was old, so that it may now be obsolete.)

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