Aptitude has SERIOUS problems with it's automatic removal "feature". I am trying to clean up my hard drive and here was my plan:
1. "dpkg -l" to get a list of installed packages. OK
2. Highlight rarely used (by me) packages such as games, graphic manipulation gizmos, etc. OK
3. do "aptitude remove <package>" for each. Started with
an attempt to remove "arts", the "Analog RealTime Synthesizer metapackage, which I will never use in a million years, resulted in the following cluster****:
The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
amor cvs edict eyesapplet fifteenapplet gettext kaddressbook-plugins
kalzium kanjidic kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox
kbounce kbruch kdeaddons-kfile-plugins kdeedu kdeedu-data
kdegames-card-data kdetoys kdewebdev keduca kenolaba kfilereplace
kfouleggs kgoldrunner khangman kig kimagemapeditor kiten kjumpingcube
klatin klettres klettres-data klickety klines klinkstatus kmahjongg
kmessedwords kmines kmoon kmplot kodo kolf kommander konquest kpat
kpercentage kpoker kreversi ksame kshisen ksig ksirtet ksmiletris ksnake
ksokoban kspaceduel kstars kstars-data kteatime ktouch ktron ktuberling
kturtle ktux kverbos kvoctrain kwin4 kwordquiz kxsldbg
libboost-python1.32.0 libcvsservice0 libkdeedu1 libkdegames1 lskat quanta
quanta-data vim vim-common vim-gtk vimpart
The following packages will be automatically REMOVED:
atlantikdesigner kde kde-amusements kdeaddons kdegames
The following packages will be REMOVED:
atlantik atlantikdesigner kde kde-amusements kdeaddons kdegames
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 89 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 135MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] ^
I think I understand the _intent_ of the dependency processing of Aptitude and manual vs. automatic install, but there is NO JUSTIFICATION UNDER ANY CONDITIONS to uninstall an entire desktop environment (kde in this instance) just because I want to remove a package that I don't and never will use. What does cvs or vim have to do
with a some synthesized sound gizmo?
Is there any way to stop aptitude from checking dependencies and just remove the stuff I tell it to?
