[Aptitude-devel] Bug#729526: ssh.deb: somewhat misleading description

[Russ Allbery]

Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org> writes:
>> Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> writes:

>>> The correct fix is for aptitude to be smart enough to not remove the
>>> dependencies of a transitional package that's marked as obsolete, and
>>> then people can just delete these packages and the right thing will
>>> happen.

> I disagree here. If a package is marked as "automatically installed", it
> should be removed if all its reverse dependencies are removed,
> independent if they're transitional packages or not. And aptitude by
> default does that automatically (compared to apt which just reports
> obsolete packages, but doesn't remove them by default).

> The way to handle such cases in the APT world is the setting
> APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections which controls if dependencies get the
> markauto flag when a packages pulls in new dependencies.

We're not actually disagreeing above.  I think Never-MarkAuto-Sections
just didn't exist when I wrote the above in 2013, and does basically what
I was suggesting.

However, an even better solution is to move the manually installed bit to
the new package when a transitional package adds a dependency on it, which
I believe is the effect of APT::Move-Autobit-Sections.  I think this bug
can now be closed since APT::Move-Autobit-Sections has been implemented.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>