autoremove keeps *all* providers of virtual rdeps unconditionally

[Roman Valov]

Hi,
i'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I have an issue with autoremove command.

The point is that I have Virtualbox package installed that has following tag:

Recommends: linux-headers

As a result autoremove marks all of linux-headers-*/linux-headers-*-generic
packages as required and declines to sweep them. Please check the attached
log file.

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

virtualbox from the Ubuntu archive for trusty has no dependency on linux-headers. You're using a non-Ubuntu package, as can be seen from your apt log above.

[Roman Valov (reddot)]

Adam, is it really considered to be okay that 3rd party package broke system functionality? I mean it sounds like some kind a way to "attack" a system with dummy deb-package. Moreover I can find several packages that depend on linux-headers-generic in universe repositories.

Probably you can point me out that depending on linux-headers-* isn't recommended by any packaging policy? Unless that I think it's definitely autoremove functionality flaw.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[thermoman (thermoman)]

This is still an issue in 16.04 LTS even with virtualbox-5.1 package from official xenial repository - please see bug #1636203

[thermoman (thermoman)]

The last comment of mine regarding "official xenial repository" is wrong - I installed virtualbox from the virtualbox.org provided repository.

The virtualbox package from virtualbox.org has

Recommends: [...] module-init-tools, linux-headers-generic | linux-headers-generic-pae | linux-headers-686-pae | linux-headers-amd64 | linux-headers-2.6-686 | linux-headers-2.6-amd64 | linux-headers, linux-image, gcc, make | [...]

whereas the official ubuntu 'virtualbox' packages does not recommends linux-* packages.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

This was fixed in yakkety. The fix is also in 1.2.15 in xenial-proposed. But as that one is already uploaded, I'm not going to add an extra xenial task to this bug.