Comment 5 for bug 1725861

While that sounds reasonable at first in simple situations, if I follow that argument, I can find no reason why we are doing complex metapackage handling, keeping many providers and a lot of other things, so we should get right of all those, too, should we?

In reality we have to deal with many many users who only very casually check the output of apt and generally trust it to do the right thing™. And that is kinda reasonable if we don't want to teach every user packaging practices. Most users will just not make the connection between having run autoremove a couple of days ago and suddenly not being able to push audio files from their favorite player&manager directly to their phones causing users (and supporters alike) to be frustrated. Having "too many" packages installed rarely causes that level of frustration in comparison.

autoremove is just not an "undo". It is supposed to remove things which are clearly no longer needed by anything. Like old kernels, old libraries and co. In fact, ideally we should end up in a situation in which autoremove can be called automatically so that old kernels are really gone, the system is cleaner after an upgrades and such… (but for various reasons that isn't really possible/advisable at the moment).

Perhaps we should implement an "undo" – just named differently as that is too confusing as we can't really perform an undo, but we have the history.log from which we can extract which packages were newly installed in an "apt install A" and offer to remove them as well (maybe with a question ala: those other packages make use of B initially installed with A, should we keep it?).

(And, while we are at it also a way for a repository to say: I don't support package A anymore with options among a) you can safely remove it as something else takes care of it now, b) here are potential alternatives [we tend to have a list in RM requests, but nothing a user can look at easily] c) it is dead and nothing compares d) look elsewhere for it e) … – which should deal with a lot of packages which autoremove should be removing, but is too scared ATM as it has not enough information to make a safe call)

[No, I haven't implemented either. I haven't even really thought about them. It just sounds for me like those could be potential ways to resolve the situation]