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

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Colin Watson wrote:
> > 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.

IIRC aptitude already supports that setting, at least because I'm
always annoyed about its default value and had to change it despite I
nearly only use aptitude. (I'm though not 100% sure as "git grep -i
Never-MarkAuto-Sections" in aptitude's source tree didn't has any
hit. Manuel probably knows more here.)

> I don't think it makes sense to add this kind of specific commentary
> to the description of every transitional package when essentially
> the same kind of problem applies to all of them.

I agree here.

> If something is to change here, it'd be better to change it
> centrally in the bits of the package management system that are
> being smart about removals (excessively so in this case).

I agree here, too.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-    |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE