Ubuntu – How to set up aptitude-curses so that it doesn’t automatically select recommended packages

aptitudepackage-management

When I select a package for installation using aptitude-curses, sometimes a huge list of extra packages appear selected under "Packages being automatically installed to satisfy dependencies". When I go through this list I see that some packages are there only because the one I was installing in the first place recommends it.

Is there a way that I can set up aptitude so that these packages are not marked for installation, but instead appear in some sort of list like the "Packages which are suggested by other packages" already do?

Best Answer

You can do this permanently or on a per aptitude invocation basis.

Permanent Method (config file)

Press Alt+F2, and run gksudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf (or your favorite editor)

Add the following lines to the file:

APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";

Per-invocation Method (command-line switch)

Simply invoke aptitude with the without-recommends switch, e.g.

sudo aptitude --without-recommends for the interactive version
or sudo aptitude install --without-recommends <packages> for cli use.

One-time installation of recommended packages when the permanent method is used

If you use the permanent method to disable installation normally, but with to use it once with aptitude, simply invoke it as in the per-invocation method, but with the --with-recommends switch.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Annotating packages at installation to ease maintenance with apt / aptitude

Aptitude supports "user tags", see if they meet your requirements.

   add-user-tag, remove-user-tag
       Adds a user tag to or removes a user tag from the selected group of
       packages. If a package name contains a tilde ("~") or question mark
       ("?"), it is treated as a search pattern and the tag is added to or
       removed from all the packages that match the pattern (see the
       section "Search Patterns" in the aptitude reference manual).

       User tags are arbitrary strings associated with a package. They can
       be used with the ?user-tag(<tag>) search term, which will select
       all the packages that have a user tag matching <tag>.

Also see the options --add-user-tag, --add-user-tag-to, --remove-user-tag, --remove-user-tag-from. One example usage:

aptitude install cinnamon --add-user-tag "for=cinnamon; date=$(date)"

Nevertheless, I fear they are only visible/usable through aptitude.

Ubuntu – How to remove recommended and suggested dependencies of uninstalled packages

If you want to remove recommended packages from your system, even if there are still some installed packages recommending (or suggesting) them, put the following in the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99_norecommends (create it):

APT::Install-Recommends "false";
APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant "false";
APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false";

The documentation for these options is here.

Then, the next apt run should remove them all. If it doesn't, launch aptitude, and type g and g again.

This configuration also disables the automatic installation of recommended packages when using apt-get. For aptitude it can be done from the console GUI, menu Options > Preferences > "Install recommended packages automatically" (uncheck it).