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I always assumed that it tended to work out for "normal" users -- that sucks if it doesn't. I tend to be the sort of person who "[thinks that] development versi

I always assumed that it tended to work out for "normal" users -- that sucks if it doesn't. I tend to be the sort of person who "[thinks that] development versions, experimental and unstable are for old ladies" (HT to xorg-edgers.) I'm pretty sure that condemns me to a life of resolving weird incompatibilities. I definitely don't personally trust autoremove as far as I can chuck it. (edit: my experience is on Ubuntu, not Debian.)

_delirium 16y ago
I've never had a problem with aptitude's autoremoval on Debian, at least. It might be somewhat more conservative than apt-get's autoremove, though I'm not sure exactly how apt-get's version works. Aptitude sort of opts-in packages to autoremoval: when aptitude itself automatically installs a package to satisfy a dependency, it remembers that fact, and only considers those packages for auto-uninstallation. So the only possible way a package will get auto-removed is if it was a package that aptitude auto-installed to begin with, and none of the reasons for the auto-installation hold anymore. Any package that got on the system some other way, such as being part of the base install from an ISO, doesn't get considered, even if nothing depends on it.