Hi

I have been using apt-get every time i have used debian, but i have wanted to start using aptitude instead. Here is the problem.

When i install software with aptitude and then i find out that i didnt want that software anymore it says that i have many unused packages and that it wants to remove them, but one of these packages is "gedit" which i use every day, so i cant imagine why it wants to remove it. When i try to remove the software with apt-get it doesnt remove them, it only removes the software and says that if i want to remove the other unused files i can use the "autoremove" option to apt-get.

Does anyone know why aptitude and apt-get want to remove gedit when im using this application frequently ? This is starting to get really annoying since i have serveral libraries and other tools that i did want it to remove and that really are unused.

Thanks for all help.

apt(itude) hasn't the foggiest idea (and doesn't care) how often something is used. It cares what is installed explicitly and what is installed as dependencies. It seems you installed something that depended on gedit, then removed it, so it think you don't want it. Try aptitude install gedit and see if that lets it know you want it explicitly, or remove then install. Also, see the man page of aptitude for the keep-all command.

Aptitude uses "unused" to refer to packages which no other package depends on. It has nothing to do with how frequently you use the package.

If you want to pick and choose which unused packages to delete I suggest that you use the orphaner command. See:

man orphaner

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Steve Stites

Choosing between apt-get and aptitude is something of a religion for some debian users. Me, I use aptitude but before I used to use apt-get. I was happy with both but when I mixed them on the same system I got some weird results on dependencies, pretty much like you're describing now. Use one and stick to it and my take is that you won't run into any serious trouble. Use both on the same system and you're likely to see some unexpected and undesired results, as they don't seem to keep track of each others dependencies (which, by the way, they handle slightly differently anyway).

# aptitude keep-all
... as mentioned above.

Thanks for your answers. I ran "aptitude keep-all" and then tried to install some software and then removed it and it doesnt seem to try to remove anything else than the software that i had installed now. I'll only use aptitude from now on and see if that gets rid of the wierd dependency information.