[packagekit] Auto Installed Packages

[Richard Hughes]

On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 13:58 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> Sounds good, but wouldn't we also need some way to communicate to the
> front end which packages would be removed so the user can confirm
> whether this is what they really want?

I think two things are probably useful to consider:

* we don't care about software not installed via the package system --
as soon as we do that we have to communicate a whole lot more detail to
the user when on general they will not be power users installing from
source.

* that deps are packages that are installed almost silently from a users
point of view, and thus probably are not useful after the original
software is removed.

> And what about a method to run a clean up operation, with no particular
> specification on what it does other than do some house keeping in the
> package management system.

You mean removing non-required packages? I don't think working through
all the packages on the system and checking for deps would scale, and
even if it did, we would need a set of "core" packages like initscripts
and lsb that could not be removed.

I've not got any smart ideas. Opinions welcome.

Richard.