On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 12:14:14PM -0700, Philip Chung wrote: > > If I mark a package for complete removal, I cannot change the mark > > directly to simple removal. > > > > Steps to reproduce: > > > > 1. Select a package. > > > > 2. Mark the package for complete removal.[1] > > > > 3. Mark the package for removal.[1] […] > In the implementation of that method (source file apt-pkg/depcache.cc), > there is a particular check that suggests a deliberate design decision to > disallow moving from purging (complete removal) to simple removal but allow > moving in the other direction:
I think the idea is that code that explicitly decided to mark a package for complete removal should not be overridden later on by code that just happens to want a package removed due to a Conflicts relation or some such. That could be resolved by looking at FromUser but the check you quoted is from 1999, while the FromUser parameter (that I added I might add) is "only" from 2009. After a quarter century of this behaviour, I am not sure it is worthwhile to "fix" this given, if I really tried, I could probably argue in favour of either way. I could frame that "decision" from 2009 a compat one given that FromUser was a new parameter and defaults to true, so that would have been a behaviour change if I had changed that… but I doubt I was thinking about that back then. So, absolutely not a fundamental design decision; just something that happened due to dumb luck/cosmic intervention/reasons. > I've CC'ed the APT team on this e-mail to get their input. If there are good (That CC'ed worked & the Fwd reached us a bit later, too. Some hop in between you, mailing list and you has probably greylisted the mail for a while making it look like it didn't reach us I suppose. No worries anyhow.) > fix." (I don't think there is a compelling reason for Synaptic to work > around this design decision in APT.) I think for an interactive graphical tool like Synaptic this behaviour of libapt might be unfortunate, but easy to work around: If you see in Step 3 that a package is marked for complete removal already, just MarkKeep it first before MarkDelete it again. Best regards David Kalnischkies
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