On 29.05.20 21:48, David Wright wrote:
On Fri 29 May 2020 at 21:57:06 (+0700), Victor Sudakov wrote:
(...)
"apt has a bug, cannot believe it!"
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2020/05/msg00567.html
Well, I must admit, I can sympathize with this person's frustration. He
just got confused among those AutoRemove* advanced options.
I think it's much more than that. The OP appeared to regard the
--no-install-recommends option as a *property* that is applied to each
package installed under that recommendation regime, and that
that property would be preserved for all time. But as the "-install-"
in --no-install-recommends shows, it's just an option for the install
command itself.
(...)
Here the OP of that thread. Exactly this, David.
I would really wish that the "--no-install-recommends" option would act
as a "--no-recommends-wished" option! Then, together with parsing the
apt log file(s) as suggested in that thread, an "undo" functionality
would become available. And concerning the OP of this thread (and I
imagine meeting many other user's needs, as well) such "undo" applied to
several packages could straight forward lead to the return to a pristine
state (independent of how somebody would like to define this state) as
asked for it here in this thread!
I should not complain, not being a programmer and not being able to
directly support Debian by myself, but... if you allow me to kindly
complain... apt should really advance in this sense. Hopefully apt
programmers are listening to us users and could make something possible.
To me as an outsider it appears to be needed that apt-cache (?) would
collect more information, collect for each package also with which
option and at which date it was installed and why it was installed or
drawn in, like by now it is only in the log files if you cared to
strictly only use "apt" instead of "apt-cache" and "apt-get" directly.
Yes, a bigger work load on apt itself, but I really think it would be
worth it. Just consider how many of us are forced to set up
sophisticated backup strategies, or applying for this file system
snapshot tools to act as a "time machine", while an enhanced apt could
target this need in an easy an elegant fashion for the user (not
speaking about the user's data and about the configuration of the
packages, but speaking about the installation state of software packages)!
Best greetings, Marco.
