Comment 2 for bug 1859314

Hi,

Launchpad Bug Tracker wrote:
> 4) script doing autojob (renewing packages since you are connected
> to internet.

Can you provide this script? Or is it a part of some package? There's
a chance that this is the culprit.

> 5) aftermath (after instalation) instal aptitude because some pro
> said "aptitude is better than apt"

If that is true or untrue depends heavily on your use-case and can't
be said generally. Both tools have their adavantages and
disadvantages. (Saying this with my aptitude package maintainer hat
on.)

Which tool is better suited for you depends mostly on this things:

* If you want

   - a TUI, or
   - want to manually interfere with dependency resolution, or
   - want to be able to match packages with patterns on package
     properties, or
   - want to use debtags to select or find package,

   then aptitude is the right tool for you. But these features come
   with one drawback: aptitude takes a moment to read (and later save)
   all the data it needs to provide these features, i.e. it's the
   slowest of the mentioned tools.

* If you prefer

  - solely the commandline,
  - prefer a fast program, and
  - don't want to change the proposed dependency resolutions, and
  - don't care about a still occasionally changing UI, CLI and output
    format,

  then apt (the command) is for you.

* If you want to

  - have a stable UI, CLI and output format
  - script things,
  - don't need aptitude's pattern matching for that, and
  - prefer fast programs

  then apt-get, apt-cache and friends (from the apt package) are the
  best tools for you.

Additionally the defaults for all three options are slightly
different, especially wrt. to automatically removing packages, but
also wrt. progress bars, colored output, stable UI/API, etc.

> 7) try to install mc --> aptitude install mc
> 8) aptitude offering you to UNinstall all proprietary drivers while u just want to install mc ...

One difference between apt-get, apt and aptitude (with default
settings) is that apt-get does not remove unused packages
automatically but just warns about them. aptitude uninstalls them by
default and apt IIRC does something inbetween. In all tools, this
setting can be changed, either on the commandline, in configuration
files and in aptitude also in the TUI.

But the main question in this case is:

_What_ marked those drivers as "automatically installed"?

None of the tools does this unless these packages were pulled in as a
dependency while installing other packages or if the admin explicitly
set this flag. (They all share the same database for these flags.)

So something must have set that "automatically installed" flag,
otherwise aptitude wouldn't have removed them automatically.

This can also be seen in the occurrences of "NOT USED" in the provided
log.

I currently see only two possibilities:

1. The above mentioned, but unknown script fiddled with the
   "automatically installed" flag, e.g. via "apt-mark auto".

2. The installation image already contained these flags for some
   reason, but since apt-get (and partially apt) doesn't automatically
   remove these packages, the creator of the image didn't care about
   these flags and this only surfaced when aptitude was used.

  Regards, Axel
--
 ,''`. | Axel Beckert <email address hidden>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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