[Aptitude-devel] Bug#877716: Bug#877716: qalculate: Removing qalculate removes qalculate-gtk

[David Kalnischkies]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 12:02:09PM +0100, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 03:56:24AM +0100, Axel Beckert wrote:
> > Now that's indeed unexpected. Can you check what "apt-config dump |
> > fgrep -i Move-Autobit-Sections" yields for you?
>
> Transcript of my test:
>
> |root at warren:/# apt-config dump | fgrep -i Move-Autobit-Sections

The autobit-moving happens for installed packages which change their
section to one of the mentioned sections on upgrade. Such upgrades will
remove the manual-installed marker from the now "oldlibs" package and
move it to the dependencies so that the oldlibs package will be cleaned
up automatically if nothing depends on it anymore – or if the user wants
to keep it for whatever reason just has to tell apt once about it.


> |root at warren:/# apt install qalculate
> |The following NEW packages will be installed:
> |  […] qalculate qalculate-gtk […]

But the setup in this bug is a new installation of the "oldlibs"
package. There is no moving done here: Imagine installing libc5 to run
some really old thingy and apt continuously nagging you to remove it
because it happens to be in "oldlibs"… can't be done, hence the
complicated one-time move on section-changing upgrades.

So, at least from an apt PoV (and like aptitude as well) this works as
intended although I see what you mean and agree that it is a bit sad
that you have to explicitly tell your package manager that you want to
keep qalculate-gtk after you figured out that you have needlessly
installed qalculate, but I don't see how we can improve this interaction
without breaking (or annoying) other usecases [In an ideal world you
would figure that out before installing qalculate as you are reading
descriptions and co before installation of course] – if there are good
ideas we could implement I would be happy to hear them!


Best regards

David Kalnischkies
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