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