[R-sig-Debian] autoremove_

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 1 August 2018 at 10:08, Göran Broström wrote:
| When I upgraded my ubuntu 18.04 system today, I got to my surprise:
| 
| -----------------------------------------------
| goran using M6800:~$ sudo apt upgrade
| Reading package lists... Done
| Building dependency tree
| Reading state information... Done
| Calculating upgrade... Done
| The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer 
| required:
|    littler r-cran-littler r-cran-pkgkitten
| Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
| -------------------------------------------------
| 
| (Why) should I remove them? Why are they 'no longer required'?

Educated guess, I am myself a little unsure here:

- when installing, the dpkg / apt / ... suite now marks a package as directly
  installed (ie "user explicitly selected this"); I have seen this in a few
  packages when doing 'apt show ...' but I am not entirely sure where this
  is stored / how we can query and display it
  
- packages only installed as a dependency get a false flag here and may
  get autoremoved which (I presume) aims and keeping the system tighter

- if you either let it uninstall them and reinstall them explicitly they
  should be marked

- all three are Suggests of r-cran-rcpp

If anybody knows anything more concrete let us know.

Hth,  Dirk

-- 
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