I have been using Linux for quite a while, but i just have recently decided to start using Debian.
I had never used Debian or a Debian based distribution until now and the reason is pretty simple. The reason is APT.
While APT is advanced it is also very complex and takes a while to get used to and learn how to work with it. So until now i did my best to stay away from it.
I will describe the situation i ran into hoping someone can explain why it happened because i can not.
FWIW, even though i think its irrelevant, this is on a Debian testing installation and all package management has been done using aptitude in its interactive command line interface.
Here's the deal:
I installed the "awesome" window manager invoking the command "aptitude install awesome".
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Will install 24 packages, and remove 0 packages.
17.0 MB of disk space will be used
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[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] cpp
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] cpp-4.4
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] dbus-x11
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libev3
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libgmp3c2
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libmpfr4
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libstartup-notification0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-atom1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-event1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-icccm1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-image0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-keysyms1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-property1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-randr0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-shape0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-shm0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-xinerama0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxcb-xtest0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxdg-basedir1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libxxf86vm1
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] menu
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] rlwrap
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] x11-xserver-utils
[INSTALL] awesome
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Will install 0 packages, and remove 1 packages.
2,785 kB of disk space will be freed
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[REMOVE] awesome
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As it turns out that ALL the dependencies of "awesome" are not marked as automatically installed. I dont know if they were when i installed them, since i installed them with "aptitude install awesome" they shouldnt, but today they werent.
From the time i installed "awesome", until today that i removed it, i have only installed and removed some packages and run "aptitude update" and "aptitude safe-upgrade" once per day keeping my testing installation up to date.
Also i have edited my sources.list once, adding a deb-src entry for the main contrib and non-free official testing repositories.
The only command i could have run that could have changed the installed status of "awesome's" dependencies, that i know of, is one with aptitude using "<package>+M or <package>&M or <package>&m" but i havent done so. It would be weird doing it on only on all of "awesome's" dependencies anyway.
Probably irrelevant as well, but in the meantime i had installed other packages providing 'x-window-manager' as well.
I would *really* like to know if anyone has any ideas of how that could have been happened. Thank you.