Thanks for the explanation of the autoremove intent (I had never seen that explanation before (never looked for it, didn't think I needed it (so far), but the understanding is helpful).
Nothing new below this line. On Friday, September 11, 2020 07:53:26 AM Greg Wooledge wrote: > In the more general case, there are two strategies to remove a whole > bunch of packages that have a dependency tree relationship. The first > strategy, which is relatively new, is to count on "apt autoremove", > which is a relatively new feature and has a lot of quirky behavior. > The concept here is that, when you installed the top-level package of > the large dependency tree (whether that's "gnome-core" or > "task-something"), apt will have marked that one package as "manually > installed", and anything else that was brought in at the same time, would > not be so marked. Then, when you want to remove all of them, you first > remove the same top-level package. This doesn't do much on its own, but > now all of the dependent packages have nothing anchoring them. So if you > follow up with an "apt autoremove", it should, in theory, remove all of > the dependent packages. > > In my experience, that doesn't work very well, so I've disabled autoremove > on my system.
