aptitude: install --without-recommends removes packages

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 07:43:23PM -0400, David B Harris <email address hidden> was heard to say:
> P.S.: 'sudo aptitude -i' doesn't want to remove/install any packages -
> so the above list was generated on-the-fly, nothing stateful involved
> with respect to the state of my selections.

  Hm, I've been considering "closing over" the state of those options
for individual packages. I'm not sure this is ideal -- in particular,
it might result in hard-to-understand behavior in some cases -- but it's
a nice way of eliminating this problem (and its reciprocal)

  Daniel

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On Thu, 18 Apr 2002 19:54:47 -0400
Daniel Burrows <email address hidden> wrote:
> Hm, I've been considering "closing over" the state of those options
> for individual packages. I'm not sure this is ideal -- in particular,
> it might result in hard-to-understand behavior in some cases -- but
> it's a nice way of eliminating this problem (and its reciprocal)

Hehehe :) I understand absolutely nothing from that paragraph except
"it's a nice ay of eliminating this problem" :) I'll leave it to you to
make a good judgement ;)

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Hey ho - sorry to bug you :) Any ETA on a fix for this? (Maybe a patch I
could .. erm .. "test"? ;)

I'm trying to install kdebase-crypto, and it wants to suck down 758M(404
packages) of stuff... If I disable suggests/recommends installing, it
wants to remove a whole bunch of stuff.

I recently had to do a rebuild, and I've been using nothing but Aptitude
since I got it installed - I'm -><- close to just using 'apt-get install
kdebase-crypto' and then going into aptitude and unmarking them as ready
for deletion :)

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________________________________________________________________________
\ David B. Harris, Systems administrator | http://www.terrabox.com /
/ <email address hidden>, <email address hidden> | http://eelf.ddts.net \
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 03:28:28PM -0400, David B Harris <email address hidden> was heard to say:
> Hey ho - sorry to bug you :) Any ETA on a fix for this? (Maybe a patch I
> could .. erm .. "test"? ;)

  Hm, dunno. I probably will make one more release for woody, with
updates to translations (and nothing else, urgency HIGH)

  After that, I can implement this -- not hard, but testing would be
good. Basically, all I want to do is save (in a package's information)
the state of Recommends-Important and Suggests-Important at the time it
was installed. (this would be used to decide what to count as a
"dependency" of that package)
  It's not ideal, but would allow things like this to work. I'd want
some testing to see how confusing (eg) it is for users.

  (sorry if I'm not making sense, I'm a bit tired)

  Daniel

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/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <email address hidden> -------------------\
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Package: aptitude
Version: 0.2.11.1-1
Followup-For: Bug #143532

I think I have a related problem. I've got "automatically remove unused
packages" set, and I've disabled auto selection of recommended and
suggested packages. Using aptitude in TUI mode, doing 'update' and
then "Go", it wants to remove a lot of packages and install a lot of
packages (like 20 or 30). If I manually re-select all the ones it wants
to remove, and de-select all the ones it wants to add, and run the
upgrade, it goes okay. The first time it happened I thought I had,
perhaps, fumble-fingered my way into it, but it's happened 3 or 4 times
now (in the last month or so), and I don't *think* it's me.

My best guess is that it's autoselecting one or two libraries for
removal (because it thinks they're no longer used?), which triggers
the removal of all the packages that depend on those libraries. Then
it notices that it has some un-fulfilled virtual package dependencies,
and auto-selects things that fulfill those virtual depends, usually not
correctly (where "correctly" == "the ones I want"). For example, the
last time this happened it was really eager to install the mips and
powerpc kernel patches packages, on my intel box. No idea where that
came from.

I realize this is a completely vague and mostly useless report, but
I suspect there may be a subtle flaw somewhere in the auto-removal
tracking...if you can think of any experiments I could run to help, or
files to provide, let me know.

Later,
Steve

-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux speedy 2.4.17 #1 Sun Feb 3 13:37:28 CST 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages aptitude depends on:
ii apt [libapt-pkg-libc6.2- 0.5.4 Advanced front-end for dpkg
ii libc6 2.2.5-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libncurses5 5.2.20020112a-7 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libsigc++0 1.0.4-3 Type-safe Signal Framework for C++
ii libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 1:2.95.4-7 The GNU stdc++ library

  Note that this isn't the same thing as the bugreport you replied to;
David was adjusting the value of the "install recommends automatically"
and "install suggestions automatically" variables manually, which
currently screws up the dependency tracking.

On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 03:08:33PM -0500, Steve Greenland <email address hidden> was heard to say:
> I think I have a related problem. I've got "automatically remove unused
> packages" set, and I've disabled auto selection of recommended and
> suggested packages. Using aptitude in TUI mode, doing 'update' and
> then "Go", it wants to remove a lot of packages and install a lot of
> packages (like 20 or 30). If I manually re-select all the ones it wants
> to remove, and de-select all the ones it wants to add, and run the
> upgrade, it goes okay. The first time it happened I thought I had,
> perhaps, fumble-fingered my way into it, but it's happened 3 or 4 times
> now (in the last month or so), and I don't *think* it's me.

  Can you reproduce this in the command-line and turn dependency display
on? (maybe "aptitude -sD install", although I'm not quite sure this
will DTRT)

  Daniel

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/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <email address hidden> -------------------\
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tags 143532 + unreproducible
severity 143532 normal
thanks

Hi

I use aptitude regularily, have "remove unused automatic
packages" enabled and lots of recommended packages have been
installed automatically.

When i update my packages listings and disable
"automatically install recommended packages" in the
"options/dependency handling" menu, then hit U and g I get the
same changes as with "automatically install recommended
packages" enabled.

ciao, 2ri
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tags 143532 - unreproducible
severity 143532 wishlist
thanks

On Tuesday 31 August 2004 12:29 pm, Arthur Korn wrote:
> tags 143532 + unreproducible
> severity 143532 normal
> thanks
>
> Hi
>
> I use aptitude regularily, have "remove unused automatic
> packages" enabled and lots of recommended packages have been
> installed automatically.

  It certainly hasn't been fixed, and I'm not sure it will be: it's easy
and safe enough to cancel auto-installations now that I think this shouldn't
be a problem.

> When i update my packages listings and disable
> "automatically install recommended packages" in the
> "options/dependency handling" menu, then hit U and g I get the
> same changes as with "automatically install recommended
> packages" enabled.

  Are you using an old version of aptitude? I'm not sure when I fixed it,
but in some previous versions package states wouldn't change to reflect
your new options until you manually installed or removed a package.

  Daniel

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Daniel Burrows schrieb:
> Are you using an old version of aptitude?

Sorry, I should have listed that version number in the first
place ...

ii aptitude 0.2.15.6-1 terminal-based apt frontend

ciao, 2ri
--
Help securing email, spread GPG, clearsign all mail. http://www.gnupg.org
.
Following the First World War, Austrian journalist Karl Wiegand made an
interesting observation. "How are nations ruled and led into war?" he asked.
"Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them
in print." This may seem cynical, but it was true then, and it is true today.
  -- http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Weapons_of_mass_deception

I perceive #143532 and #237830 to be fundamentally about the same
problem, although I'm not sure you agree. Do you think they could be
merged? Do you think one or both is identical to Ubuntu
<https://launchpad.net/products/aptitude/+bug/56742>? For the time
being, I marked it as upstream #143532, but I'm really not at all sure.

/* era */

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On Sun, Oct 22, 2006 at 10:21:36PM +0300, era eriksson <email address hidden> was heard to say:
> I perceive #143532 and #237830 to be fundamentally about the same
> problem, although I'm not sure you agree. Do you think they could be
> merged? Do you think one or both is identical to Ubuntu
> <https://launchpad.net/products/aptitude/+bug/56742>? For the time
> being, I marked it as upstream #143532, but I'm really not at all sure.

  Well, those two bugs don't have anything in common except that they both
involve users getting packages removed when they didn't expect it. #237830
looks like it turned out to be an unreproducible non-issue and doesn't
involve the unused-package code at all (as far as I was ever able to
determine).

  #143532 is a consequence of the fact that aptitude implements
--without-recommends and --with-recommends by just setting the corresponding
option to true or false. This has the effect that --with-recommends will
lead to the recommended packages being removed in the next run, while
--without-recommends will discard packages currently installed by
recommendations. On reflection, these are probably not useful things to
do. I don't see a sensible way to implement --with-recommends without
getting into serious DWIM territory...however, it shouldn't be hard to
make --without-recommends only affect new installations, which I think
is the only sensible behavior for that option.

  Daniel

# Automatically generated email from bts, devscripts version 2.10.10
forcemerge 424932 143532

Until this bug is fixed, could the following be redacted from the
manpage?

  -R, --without-recommends
    [...]
    Packages previously installed due to recommendations will not be
    removed.

--
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On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 05:43:25PM -0500, Frédéric Brière <email address hidden> was heard to say:
> Until this bug is fixed, could the following be redacted from the
> manpage?
>
> -R, --without-recommends
> [...]
> Packages previously installed due to recommendations will not be
> removed.

  It was fixed in the same commit that introduced those lines:

changeset: 588:fc7b9b620fe9
user: Daniel Burrows <email address hidden>
date: Sat Jan 06 22:29:15 2007 +0000
summary: [aptitude @ Enable Keep-Recommends as well as disabling
Recommends-Important when --without-recommends is passed. This may have
side-effects I haven't forseen, but seems much better than removing
piles of packages for a single install. (Closes: #143532)]

daniel@alpaca:~/programming/aptitude/head$ hg diff -r 587:588
diff -r 0f9daa5a5dfc -r fc7b9b620fe9 doc/en/manpage.xml
--- a/doc/en/manpage.xml Sat Jan 06 06:27:33 2007 +0000
+++ b/doc/en/manpage.xml Sat Jan 06 22:29:15 2007 +0000
@@ -763,10 +763,12 @@ ihA raptor-utils - Ra
          <para>
            Do <emphasis>not</emphasis> treat recommendations as
            dependencies when installing new packages (this overrides
settings in <filename>/etc/apt/apt.conf</filename> and
<filename>~/.aptitude/config</filename>).
+ Packages previously installed due to recommendations
+ will not be removed.
          </para>

          <para>
- This corresponds to the configuration option <literal><link
            linkend='configRecommends-Important'>Aptitude::Recommends-Important</link></literal>
+ This corresponds to the pair of configuration options
<literal><link
linkend='configRecommends-Important'>Aptitude::Recommends-Important</link></literal>
and <literal><link
linkend='comfigKeep-Recommends'>Aptitude::Keep-Recommends</link></literal>.
          </para>
        </listitem>
       </varlistentry>
diff -r 0f9daa5a5dfc -r fc7b9b620fe9 src/main.cc
--- a/src/main.cc Sat Jan 06 06:27:33 2007 +0000
+++ b/src/main.cc Sat Jan 06 22:29:15 2007 +0000
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 // main.cc (ne�testscr.cc)
 //
-// Copyright 1999-2006 Daniel Burrows
+// Copyright 1999-2007 Daniel Burrows
 //
 // This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 // modify
 // it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
 // by
@@ -323,6 +323,7 @@ int main(int argc, char *argv[])
          break;
        case 'R':
          aptcfg->SetNoUser(PACKAGE "::Recommends-Important", "false");
+ aptcfg->SetNoUser(PACKAGE "::Keep-Recommends", "true");
          break;
        case 't':
          aptcfg->SetNoUser("APT::Default-Release", optarg);

  Apparently the Debian changelog didn't get picked up by the archive
software (maybe it was a multi-version upload?) so this wasn't closed.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'll close it immediately.

  Daniel

Version: 0.4.5-1
Package: aptitude

  For some reason, these bugs didn't get closed when 0.4.5-1 was
uploaded.

  (these should all be aptitude bugs. I checked them by hand before
closing, but I could have typoed; I apologize if I hit anyone else's
bugs but my own!)

  Daniel

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