[Tfug] apt-get undo

[Claude Rubinson]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 06:46:00PM -0700, johngalt1 wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Glen Pfeiffer" <glen>
> To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>
> Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 1:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [Tfug] apt-get undo
> 
> 
> > On [30/08/08 11:26 -0700] johngalt1 wrote:
> >>After doing an apt-get install, I realized a lot more than the
> >>package specified was installed. How would you back off the
> >>changes?
> >
> > Are you familiar with aptitude's ability to remove all
> > automatically installed dependencies? This functionality has been
> > added to apt-get in testing, but it's not there in etch so you'll
> > need to use aptitude instead. Try 'aptitude purge <package-name>'.
> 
> That will be excellent when the function mentioned makes it
> to stable. Right now, aptitude purge just removes the
> package plus data files.

For aptitude's purge function to work properly, you need to have
installed the package via aptitude.  If you install via apt-get,
aptitude has no way of knowing what else was pulled in along the way.

Aptitude has been Debian's recommended package manager for a few years
now and it's worth switching to.  It's pretty much a drop in
replacement for apt-get and apt-cache (aptitude update, aptitude
upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade, etc).  (Although in testing,
dist-upgrade has been renamed "full-upgrade" and upgrade is now
"safe-upgrade".)

Claude