Aptitude – remove all packages in X11 category, except for dependencies of a specific package

aptitudepackage-management

I would like to remove most of the packages in the X11 category from my system. However some of those packages are depended on by the 'beaglebone' package. How could I ask aptitude to remove everything in the X11 category, with the exception of the packages depended on by 'beaglebone'?

You can see below that it recommends 'beaglebone' as one of the packages that should be uninstalled at the risk of being broken.

How can I make sure that this package and its dependencies are retained after the removal?

Best Answer

The short answer is:

aptitude remove '~sX11 ! ~Rbeaglebone'

However in this kind of situation (there are a lot of things that depend on X11!), I recommend using the interactive resolver. To do this add the --schedule-only option to the above and run aptitude again without arguments .You may also have to add -o Aptitude::Auto-Fix-Broken=false to one or both commands (if it is not already in your settings), but I don't think you need it as as far as I can see the automatic resolution only happens when you press g in the interface.

Once you have the ncurses interface running, press e to examine the first solution and look at the additional removals. If you see any you don't want, use the arrow keys to select it and press r to reject the action. Press . to load the next solution, it should now provide a solution that doesn't include any of your rejections. Repeat as necessary and press ! to accept the solution and continue as normal.

Related Solutions

Debian – How to remove gnome-games package without removing other packages

It appears that all of those were automatically installed as dependencies of the gnome metapackage. As you said, the gnome metapackage is incomplete without the gnome-games package, so it must be removed. That renders all the packages listed unused and so aptitude wants to remove them. There may be a way to remove gnome without removing its unused dependencies, but a quick search didn't show one and I suspect that it would try to uninstall them every time you removed something else. Your best bet is probably to figure out which of those packages you explicitly want and mark them manually installed, then let it uninstall the remainder if they're still unneeded.

aptitude – How to search for packages depending on an exact package

The argument of ?depends, like any other directive, is a search pattern. The pattern "vim" is a regular expression that the package name must contain. To search for an exact package name, you need to anchor the regex: "^vim$".

aptitude search '?depends("^vim$")'
aptitude search '?depends(^vim$)'
aptitude search '~D^vim$'

You can also use the ?exact-name directive, but for some reason, at least with aptitude 0.6.6, it's slower.

aptitude search '?depends(?exact-name(vim))'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Debian – How to remove gnome-games package without removing other packages

aptitude – How to search for packages depending on an exact package

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