Removing packages with synaptic
 

Hi,
I'm trying to remove some packages that I don't need (like gnumeric) with synaptic. When I choose that package and click "Mark for removal" It says gnome, gnome-office and gnumeric-common should be removed as well. Well, of course I don't want to uninstall gnome entirely, so how can I remove this package only (this happens with other packages too, sometimes telling me to remove KDE as well). Is there some dependency issue that I don't know about ? :confused:

Distro : Debian sarge 3.1

Thanks in advance,
stingerkiss
:Pengy:

Possibly. What is the history of the install. Do you have mixed sources (stable and testing and unstable all at the same time)? Any backported programs?

You can try apt-cache showpkg gnumeric and check the reverse dependencies to see if KDE or gnome are really listed as reverse depends...

Everything is from stable. I don't know what backported programs are but I installed all the programs with dselect / synaptic (not by myself), if that's what you mean.
I ran apt-cache and got a whole bunch of packages under Reverse Depends, including gnome-office. When I ran apt-cache on gnome-office I got (again) many packages in that section including gnome. Is that normal ? What "Reverse Depends" means anyway ?
Thanks a lot,
stingerkiss
:Pengy:

A dependency is a file that must be installed before the new file will be installed. So for gnumeric, a dependency means that something else has to be installed first before gnumeric can be installed. Apt handles these dependencies.

Reverse dependencies are files that depend on the file you're looking at. For example, gnome-office apparently depends on gnumeric. You can't install gnome-office without first installing gnumeric.

I'm not sure, but it might be okay to let it remove those packages as well because they might just be what they call meta-packages (packages that are just lists of other packages). They are basically just a list of other packages. installing gnome will include a whole bunch of stuff, including gnome-office. But if you just want gnome and don't want gnome office, you probably have to install gnome-core instead.

So if you're brave, just let it remove those packages. If you're not so brave. Just install something else to use and don't worry about taking up the extra couple of MB.

Well, I was brave and uninstalled a lot of things I didn't need (more than 100 packages, including gnumeric) and everything is still working. and I learnd a few new things by the way...
Thanks a lot !! :D
stingerkiss,
:Pengy:

If you ever reinstall Debian, you might think about building a trim system from the base up. That's generally what I do to reduce the bloat.

Grab a netinstall CD and don't select anything when you're in the task selector. This will install base system and you reboot to the command line as no GUI was installed. Then from there you can just build your system with things like aptitude install x-window-system-core gnome-core and then only install the programs you want.

I've got a very usable Celeron 400MHz w/ 256MB RAM that runs a KDE desktop that was installed w/ kde-core instead of KDE.