Synaptic claims whole system als "manually installed"

[BeowulfOF]

Binary package hint: synaptic

beowulf@stormrider:~$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10

beowulf@stormrider:~$ apt-cache policy synaptic
synaptic:
  Installiert: 0.62.7ubuntu6
  Kandidat: 0.62.7ubuntu6
  Versions-Tabelle:
 *** 0.62.7ubuntu6 0
        500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Since I installed Ubuntu regulary and just removed the programms f-spot, vinagre and rhythmbox I thought that synaptic would recognize things like acpid, adduser, etc as installed, but not as "installed (manually)". At least in last ubuntu versions it worked like that, and i could remove savely all applications marked as "installed (manually)", since no system relevant apps where marked as those. Now, the "installed" applications list does not differ from the "installed (manually)" list.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jan 25 21:24:49 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
Package: synaptic 0.62.7ubuntu6
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-generic
SourcePackage: synaptic
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-generic i686

[SimonP (peeters-simon)]

the problem is here that synaptic automatically installs ALL (also the dependencies of a selected package) packages as being "manually installed" also noticed that in 10.10 the list "can be removed automatically" has been removed (witch makes it even harder to clean up your system for unneeded dependencies)

[BeowulfOF (beowulfof)]

But the whole system is not installed by synaptic, is it?

I just use synaptic to clean up, for installing i typically use simple apt-get...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Lucas Saliés Brum (sistematico)]

Same here, LMDE, synaptic 0.70.

[Daniel Hartwig (wigs)]

SimonP (peeters-simon) wrote:
> the problem is here that synaptic automatically installs
> ALL (also the dependencies of a selected package) packages
> as being "manually installed"

If that was ever true, it certainly is no longer the case.

BeowulfOF (beowulfof) wrote:
> But the whole system is not installed by synaptic, is it?

No, it is not. The base packages are installed in two or more phases. In Debian, this uses:
- debootstrap, which installs a very few packages;
- tasksel, which installs perhaps many packages.

All such packages are marked manually installed, at least in the past.

Recently both Debian and Ubuntu move to using task packages to handle the default set of packages, and this should reduce the amount of noise you see on a *freshly installed* desktop system. This means that only those packages installed in the first phase (debootstrap) will be marked manual, plus a very few packages like ‘task-desktop’.

There have also been problems with e.g. upgrading packages marks them as manually installed. Most such issues have been resolved.

It is a kind of systemic problem that has been resolved quite a bit recently, though perhaps not fully. It is not a bug in synaptic per se, so I am marking the task as invalid. However, developers are quite aware of the general issue and working to resolve the few remaining pieces.