On 03/07/2025 5:28 pm, Dan Ritter wrote:
Federico Kircheis wrote:
On 30/06/2025 7:11 pm, Michael Paoli wrote:
And this also holds for metapackages like lxqt.
It still installs a lot of things, so down to lxqt-core.
It still installs some things I've noticed and to not want, so I need to
inspect which packages are installed, transitive dependencies included..
I hoped it would have been possible to exclude dependencies, for example by
prefixing them with "-"; for example:
apt install lxqt -meteo-qt
You can postfix "-" to get that behavior.
apt install lxqt meteo-qt-
Oh; i was not aware of that, is it specific for apt?
man apt does not seem to mention it.
I'll try it out.
Also, do you know that the -s switch to apt install will tell
you the whole plan without retrieving or installing the packages?
But if I list all packages, then remove all those that I obviously do
not need, and write a script that install only those, it might "break"
when some packages are updated or new dependencies are added.
With the blacklist approach, I expected it would break only if the
package is now required.
On 03/07/2025 5:51 pm, Greg wrote:
I'm only aware of '--no-install-recommends' as far as apt goes.
Yes, but it has the same issue.
Now many things are missing, and I need to search them out, and
dependencies might change between package releases.
Of course, with a 100 terabyte hard disk, it can seem rather silly.
* my drives are nowhere that big, but if someone will pay for a
replacement, no offense taken, although on some devices it is not that
easy to replace them
* downloading and uploading unnecessary data not only takes space on
my drive, but also takes more time and unnecessarily consumes my traffic
plan. I'm not necessarily talking about the .deb file by itself, but
also docker images, iso files, virtual machines, and so on, which are
built on top of installed deb packages.
* a system with more dependencies has a higher chance to break than a
system with less dependencies when upgrading components
* offsite backups take longer, as verifying they integrity and restore
process
And I'm sure I can find other reason why avoiding some unnecessary
dependencies has positive side-effects
