[GTALUG] Ubuntu (or debian): apt-get auto-remove?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 10:57:09AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> After my update from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04, apt-get tells me that there 
> are a lot of packages that apt-get auto-remove could remove.
> 
> Is that safe?  What is the underlying idea?

Yes.  The idea is that libraries and such that were dependancies of foo
version x and no longer needed by foo version y, so nothing depends
on them anymore, and since you did not explicitly ask for them to be
installed (they were installed automatically to solve dependancies)
they can now be removed.

> I think that it removes things that were added due to dependencies where 
> those dependencies no longer exist.  In the back of my mind, I worry that 
> sometimes dependencies might be things that I wanted independently of why 
> they were installed, but I'm not sure of that.
> 
> Do people fine apt-get auto-remove works great or do you find that it 
> throws a few babies out with the bathwater?

It has never failed me.

-- 
Len Sorensen