On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 12:56 PM, < imkilgor@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

Also note that aptitude is superior and should be used in favour of
apt-get due to its ability to track packages installed solely as
dependencies and remove them when no longer needed, and its greater
capacity for resolving conflicts.

(Be sure to disable the automatic installing of packages marked as
'Recommends' though, or you'll end up doing things like installing half of
gnome when you just wanted gnupg... invoke it with -R or add:

APT::Install-Recommends "0";

to your /etc/apt/apt.conf (create it if it doesn't exist)).

If aptitude isn't your thing, at the very least don't mix the two.
aptitude maintains a separate database to track packages installed as
depends, and packages installed via apt-get don't end up there, meaning
when aptitude is run it tends to think everything you installed with
apt-get was a dependency for something else rather than explicitly
installed, and it will attempt to remove them. (This behaviour might have
improved in the last 1-2 years..)
--
ik