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Automatically-installed packages are being marked as manually installed

Asked by Shahar Or

Hi and thank you for the remarkable Aptitude.

I'm on the development version of Ubuntu and upgrade packages daily using aptitude.

Upon reviewing daily upgrades, I consistently discover that many packages which I am sure to have previously marked as automatically-installed, are now marked as manually installed.

What could be the cause of this, please?

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

I suggest you report a bug. Wily is not stable and not ready.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#2

If you have a bug reported you don't need a question as well, let alone two...

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Shahar Or (mightyiam) said : 		#3

My bug was closed as being a question. True story.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#4

Does apt-get display it all OK?

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#5

This case - "you created a question document, you were told to create a bug report, and then the bug report was converted back into a new question" - is a bit ridiculous. Sorry for that. It should not happen that way.

There is a known problem that in some cases kernel-packages are marked as "manually installed" such that "sudo apt-get --purge autoremove" does not purge the obsolete kernels, and the /boot partition gets filled up, see Bug #1175637 .

The workaround proposal for such case is issuing the command
apt-mark showmanual | grep linux-image | xargs sudo apt-mark auto

(I know that this does not solve the root cause for the packages being wrongly marked as manually installed.)

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Shahar Or (mightyiam) said : 		#6

Thank you, @m-hampl,

This does not happen with kernel packages.

It happens with libraries.

I thought that perhaps some kind of dependency is causing this. Perhaps pre-depends. But I read about pre-depends and from what I can understand, it shouldn't result in that.

Yet, something does result in that.

And I'm using only aptitude for package management. So I have a guess that Daniel knows.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#17

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.