Comment 34 for bug 831768

I decided I don't need aptitude anymore. Thought this info might be useful for others here. Of course, aptitude should still be fixed.

I only used aptitude because I knew if I installed a package, and it automatically installed dependencies, then I uninstalled that package, it would also uninstall its dependencies. When I started using aptitude, apt-get couldn't do that. I basically never use the ncurses interface of aptitude anymore.

It turns out that "apt-get remove" provides that same functionality of removing automatically installed dependencies. Both dependencies that were installed via aptitude, and apt-get. Handling of dependencies installed by aptitude was addded "~4 years ago... when apt started having a notion of autoinstalled packages". - #ubuntu-devel

The devel channel also said that autoremove also works for dependencies installed by all the gui package management software: software-center, update-manager, and synaptic, because they use libapt. So I can stop avoiding using those, which is nice.

You need to use "autoremove" instead of "remove" because apparently somebody thought that was bad default behavior. I'd like something shorter to type than "autoremove".

And, as I guess has been mentioned earlier in this bug, the aptitude resolver is kind of icky.

Here's the evidence autoremove works:

# lsb_release -c
Codename: oneiric

# aptitude install clisp
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  clisp libffcall1{a}
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

# apt-get autoremove clisp
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  clisp libffcall1
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

# apt-get install clisp
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libffcall1
Suggested packages:
  clisp-doc clisp-dev slime
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  clisp libffcall1
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

# apt-get autoremove clisp
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  clisp libffcall1
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.