[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Michael A. Peters]

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 14:44 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 15:23 +0200, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> > Hi.
> > 
> > On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 06:19:16 -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> > 
> > > Does that mean mathml-fonts will get automatically removed out from
> > > under me?
> > 
> > It may, which is one of the problems with this approach.
> 
> Why do people feel the need to argue about problems that were solved
> years ago? aptitude already provides a very nice interface for this. Its
> entirely transparent, packages that are flagged auto installed have an
> "A" flag to the left. This flag can be toggled with a single keystroke.
> And to top it all off, aptitude gives you a very nice summary of exactly
> everything its going to do any why before it does it. You can even
> modify package flags and status right there on the preview page:

That assumes that the end user knows what a package is and what it does.
Say I had no clue that mathml-fonts were needed to properly view the
blog of my Physics professor. I might not even know what mathml is. It
just works because something else pulled them in as a dependency.

Now I remove abiword, and the next time I visit his blog, it does not
properly display, and I'm clueless as to why.

I think that automatic dependency removal solves a problem that no
longer exists when 160 GB hard drives are dirt cheap. The only benefit I
see is that with less packages, less bandwidth is needed to keep a
system up to date with patches.