Ubuntu
apt package

add Manual Install filter to synaptic

Bug #232189 reported by Andrew Kerr on 2008-05-20

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #122047: No way to view explicity installed packages, excluding automatically installed packages. Edit Remove

This bug affects 2 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	apt (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: synaptic

Ubuntu 8.04
synaptic 0.61ubuntu9

Please add a filter listing packages that have been manually installed (MI) to synaptic. At the moment automatically installed (AI) packages can be listed but not MI ones.

Being able to easily manage the MI list will provide debfoster-like functionality to synaptic as adjusting the MI list alters the AI list allowing easy package pruning.

MI list is installed but not automatically so: aptitude search '~i!~M'

Revision history for this message

Ralf Kistner (ralf-kistner) wrote on 2009-03-16:

This would be a very useful feature. Without this, it is just about impossible to find and remove all the packages I don't need.

The filter should only display packages that are manually installed, and not a dependency of another package.

Revision history for this message

pelle.k (pele2) wrote on 2009-07-17:

I'm quite sure this "bug" would be more appropriate to link against apt. If you disagree, please change it back to synaptic.
The problem is that apt marks dependencies (and recommends) when installing metapackages as "automatically installed: no". I belive this is because you should be able to remove some packages that belongs to a metapackage, such as ubuntu-desktop, without removing it. The result is that listing manually installed packages with;
"aptitude search ~i\!~M"
is misleading, because of the rationale i described above. I'm not sure, but i think this behaviour is used when preseeding certain packages as well. Most "required" and "essential" packages are also marked as manually installed.

I've written a hackish algoritm in bash to emulate the behaviour of debfoster. But finding out manually installed packages this way, is just that - hackish. Even then, you get only top-level manually installed packages.
I would rather see apt mark packages as "hard" and "soft" depends, instead of never marking them as auto (as i described earlier). And for the purpose of listing manually, and i mean deliberately, installed packages, i propose another flag, just for that purpose. In apt.
"Arch linux" package manager, pacman, does just that. And it works great.

affects:	synaptic (Ubuntu) → apt (Ubuntu)
Changed in apt (Ubuntu):
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Andrew Kerr (andrewkerr) wrote on 2009-10-11:

There is now a "Manually Installed" filter under "Status" in synaptic (0.62.7ubuntu3 in karmic) so this bug (as I originally filed it) is fixed. The changelog alerted me to bug #122047 which this bug is really a duplicate of, even though it didn't use the "Manually Installed" language (probably why I didn't find it when reporting).