[oclug] apt-get foolishness

[Brad Barnett]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2002 22:07:06 -0400
"Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier at storm.ca> wrote:

>     Could someone please explain to me why, when I try to remove all
>     gnome
> libraries, it tries to install a whole whack of s**t?
> 
>     I find this _very_ confusing and non-intuitive. I want it to remove.
> Remove, not install. Remove!

This certainly doesn't happen here.  I suspect that at the time you did
this, you had some sort of dependency conflict.  That is, you had many
things installed, but apt had several of the files below on hold because
they conflicted with other installed packages.  Apt would have
automatically resolved this in time, but hadn't yet.

When you did the libgnome* removal, you removed the libs that were
conflicting with the software waiting to install, and it installed them,
just as you would expect!  Whenever you are working with apt, if it finds
that the action you are taking will resolve an issue with a package that
is waiting to be install, it will then install it!

A better option to remove gnome, would be "apt-get remove .*gnome.*"