On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 11:31:39AM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote: > On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 03:12:17AM -0500, Scott Colby wrote: > > Package: apt > > Version: 1.8.2.2 > > Severity: important > > > > Dear Maintainer, > > > > I am having some difficulty with apt's autoremove command. In order to get a > > clean reproduction, I installed Debian in a fresh virtual machine from the > > debian-10.7.0-amd64-netinst.iso that I downloaded this evening. > > > > I ran the following sequence of commands: > > > > # apt update; apt upgrade > > # apt install exim4 # 24 packages are installed > > # apt remove exim4 # only exim4 is removed, as expected > > # apt autoremove # no other packages are removed! > > > > I would have expected the 23 other packages installed by the install command > > would be removed by the subsequent autoremove. Why is this not happening? Is > > this a misconfiguration, a bug, or a misunderstanding on my part? > > Most likely: > > exim4 depends on an exim4-daemon-$something, all of which provide > mail-transport-agent. If one installed package depends/recommends/suggests > mail-transport-agent, it won't be autoremoved. > > This is not a bug, and we might eventually get a cool feature to undo > history, but it's not there yet, and I don't want to track it in a bug.
As a bonus point; I do have a system cleanup script that removes as many automatically installed packages as possible while keeping all manually insttalled ones: http://salsa.debian.org/jak/cleanup Clone that, install clasp, and run ./program_builder.py to have it give you a list of packages that can be removed. This is very thorough and a lot less safe than apt's autoremove. I need to work on adding a clasp solving backend to apt, then we can have a thorough autoremove code in apt too (and solve dependencies and order installations as best as possible :D). -- debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev ubuntu core developer i speak de, en
