On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Carl Meyer
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Reinout van Rees wrote:
Debian/ubuntu has a mechanism to clean up packages that were once installed to satisfy dependencies but that aren't needed anymore.
The handiest course of action is probably looking up how they do it. (/me doesn't know now it works internally, btw)
Apt has a file, /var/lib/apt/extended_states, which stores an "Auto-Installed" flag with same semantics as the REQUESTED flag (inverted). Though there are issues with the flag not being set correctly for base-system packages, and not all tools take advantage of the flag, the stored metadata is the same.
Carl
FYI we agreed with Carl on IRC that he would work on a diff for the REQUESTED section, to build a small Rationale chapter. So the need becomes more obvious from Distutils PoV Tarek