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Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages

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The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> writes:

> if you
> want to know "what's the dependency chain which is keeping this from
> being safe to remove?", you're probably better off running 'apt-get
> --dry-run remove [packagename]', and seeing whether the result wants to
> remove anything that you care about.

Well, I usually just call aptitude purge without --simulate because I
want unneeded packages to be really removed and aptitude asks for
confirmation if it would need to remove more packages.  Here, with -s,
but you can see that gcc-4.8-base is really not needed by anything.

# aptitude remove -s gcc-4.8-base
The following packages will be REMOVED:  
  gcc-4.8-base 
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 176 kB will be freed.
Would download/install/remove packages.

> 'apt-get autoremove' deals only with packages which are marked as
> auto-installed; for undetermined reasons, some packages which you
> wouldn't expect to be get marked as manual. 'apt-mark showmanual' will
> list all packages which are flagged as manually-installed.

But as I showed in my first mail, gcc-4.8-base *is* auto-installed:

# apt-mark showmanual | grep gcc
#

Despite this, apt-get autoremove doesn't remove it.

> One thing I habitually do nowadays, to minimize this type of problem, is
> to also run
> 
> # apt-get remove $(deborphan)
> 
> and interleave that back and forth with 'apt-get autoremove' calls until
> neither one of them wants to remove anything anymore.

That also doesn't help:

# apt-get autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
# deborphan
raspi-copies-and-fills



BTW, this also is strange since raspi-copies-and-fills is *not*
auto-installed:

# apt-mark showmanual | grep raspi
raspi-copies-and-fills


That's why from time to time I look through the whole list of
installed packages that look suspicious, i.e. auto-installed packages,
especially with names matching lib*, *-common, and *-base, and that
have multiple instances installed of the same name differing only in
version.  It seems there is no other reliable way to get rid of some
old stuff :-(

> This doesn't 100% address the issue, but it will deal with more of it
> than you might think.
> 
> Does the 'deborphan' command report gcc-4.8-base, in your case?

No, as shown above.

urs

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Thread

aptitude doesn't remove unused packages Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> - 2020-04-22 22:30 +0200
  Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2020-04-22 22:40 +0200
    Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> - 2020-04-23 00:20 +0200
      Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-04-23 04:30 +0200
    Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net> - 2020-04-23 03:40 +0200
  Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-04-23 08:20 +0200
    Re: aptitude doesn't remove unused packages Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net> - 2020-04-23 13:20 +0200

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