Hi Didier,
Didier Kryn writes:
> Le 18/12/2021 à 14:55, Antony Stone a écrit:
>> On Saturday 18 December 2021 at 14:43:30, Didier Kryn wrote:
>>
>>> Aptitude why libpulse0 only lists xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, but it
>>> misses a lot, including indirectly xfce4.
>> Yes, this is in my opinion one of the shortcomings of "aptitude why" - it only
>> goes "one level up", whereas I would like it to follow each dependency until
>> it finds something that was installed manually, or is a system-essential
>> component.
>>
>> So, you did "aptitude why libpulse0" and it said "xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin".
>>
>> However, was that:
>> "xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin Depends libpulse0" or
>> "xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin Recommends libpulse0" or
>> "xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin Suggests libpulse0" ?
> depends. This is obvious. the plugin needs at least to determine if
> PA is installed. libpulse0 plays the same role as libsystemd0. And
> package xfce4 is probably a virtual package which has no content but
> only dependencies, one of them being xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin. The
> problem is when you remove xfce4, all the useful stuff of xfce4 which
> were installed automatically become "removable" and you need to turn
> them one by one to "manually installed" to secure them.
ACK. I really wish the xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin dependency were
downgraded to a Recommends:. Note to self, submit a bugreport!
# Don't mind if someone else beats me to it. If so, submit to Debian
# BTS cuz this ain't no Devuan bug.
While I agree that marking all dependencies of xfce4 is a PITA, the list
is not all that long. Even if it were
sudo apt-mark manual \
$(dpkg-query -W -f '${Depends}\n' xfce4
| sed 's/([^)]*)//g; s/,//g')
should do the trick.
Warning: Check the output of the command in $() before feeding it to
apt-mark. If there's any `|` in there, DON'T feed it to apt-mark.
After that you can, in theory,
apt purge xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
without losing your xfce4 dependencies.
URK! Dogfooding this, I am told that another 150+ are going to be
purged, most likely because of task-desktop and task-xfce-desktop being
automatically installed.
Hmm, doesn't look as easy as I first thought.
Oh well, perhaps this helped. If not, too bad.
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2 FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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