Dependencies
 

Hi,

Have switched some month ago from Suse 8.2 with quite a lot of selfmade enhancements to Sarge. Why? I didn't quite like the modifications the Suse-guys did and do to the programs in their distribution. F.i. compiling a new program more often than not led to a real orgy first downloading tid and tad other programs to get this one finally through the make-process as the ones supplied by Suse were not apt to fulfill the needed requirements.
No flame meant against Suse, if you use their distribution as supplied and only update from their site, you have no troubles... but miss things, that you'd like to have.
Well, with Sarge till now I'm not very unhappy although I have not yet put much effort in 'enhancements'. Getting acquainted to the new philosophy, possibilities aso. took most of my time. But there is at this moment one thing, that I sincerely do dislike as I want to have a system, that only contains things I have and want to use: the built-in dependencies in a lot of cases.

Example: I don't have a scanner. So I wanted to remove "sane" via aptitude. Aptitude told me, that "kooka" depended on it (okay, reasonably that) so I also
wanted to remove kooka. Then came the message, that "kdegraphics" depended
on kooka. This I couln't reasonably follow as logical, but nevertheless I
wanted to get rid of sane/kooka, so started the removal. And yes,
kdegraphics was completely removed too, leaving me with a severely
mutilated KDE-system.
Newbie as I am, I then (re)installed kdegraphics. And, oh what surprise,
aptitude decided to additionally install kooka and sane, like it or not.
Where is the logic in that?

Now my question. How can I, of course sticking to apt(itude), get rid (better still not even download and install) of programs, that make no sense to me at all? But still have a rock-solid system left.

Thanks.

KDEGraphics actually is a meta-package. It consists of a lot of graphics utilities (including kooka). I've never tried this, but maybe you can completely uninstall kdegraphics (the meta package) and only install the individual packages (that are in kdegraphics) you really need. So, you install the programs 1-by-1 manually instead of installing the whole graphics package.

Again, I've never tried this, but it might work.

it would work.

debian makes metapackages to make installing kde and gnome easy. for example:

apt-get install kde

installs the kde metapackage which depends on kdemultimedia, kdegraphics, and every other kde metapackage. each seperate metapackage has it's own deps like juk, kaboodle, etc.

after you have the software installed, you don't need the metapackages installed anymore.

Metapackages are just collections of other packages. You can safely remove it without any effects on your system. Metapackages just makes it easier to install a system of packages(i.e. apt-get kde vs. apt-get kdelibs, kdemultimedia, kdegraphics...). So, rather than selecting the kdegraphics metapackage, only select the parts of the metapackage that you want to use.

You can use apt-get showpkg or see a list here:
http://packages.debian.org/testing/kde/kdegraphics

Hi,
Thanks for your replies, the construction of a "metapackage" was new to me.
Marking 'kdegraphics' as to purge _but_, before giving the go-command, checking as to what additional packages would be deleted (there were that I wanted to keep!)
solved the problem.
Maybe a hint for other people who want to do the same: open a xterm with aptitude in it and in another window open the Debian-page with the contents of the metapackage in question. Now mark in aptitude this metapackage as to purge but do not 'go for it' already. With one eye have a look at the Debian-site what programs are involved and with the other eye check if none of these (via the /-search) programs are marked in aptitude as to be deleted, that you still want to keep. Correct these and only when you are satisfied with the result, press GO.
This avoids the "crippled" KDE that I got after my exercise, before asking here.