apt and autoremove

[Schwarzer Kater]

Dear experts,

initiated by an observation oshunluvr made I have the following question:

I install a program, let's say "myprogram", with apt or apt-get or Dolphin, Muon - you get the idea - and the package manager also automatically installs a dependency for myprogram called myprogramsdependency.

Just before that I had e.g. a kernel update, but I have not removed the oldest kernel (the third installed kernel then in case of *Ubuntu) yet.

Now I want to get rid of myprogram again and I deinstall it with:

1. either
   sudo apt-get remove --autoremove myprogram
2. or
   sudo apt-get remove myprogram
   sudo apt-get autoremove

Until now I would have thought that

• in case number 1.) only myprogram and myprogramsdependency would be removed
  and
• in case number 2.) myprogram - and with the second command - myprogramsdependency and the old kernel would be removed.

Is this wrong?
Do both 1. and 2. remove myprogram, myprogramsdependency and the old kernel and have I misunderstood apt-get for all these years?

[oshunluvr]

The manpage for both apt and apt-get say:

autoremove - Remove automatically all unused packages

Whereas pkcon has this:

--autoremove Automatically remove unused dependencies

Might be worth it to try that one...

[Schwarzer Kater]

Good idea - I will test that, thank you!

Edit:
It works! I will replace sudo apt-get remove --autoremove with pkcon remove --autoremove "for safety reasons" now.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Edit 2:
I removed the dancing Snoopy, because I still have to figure out how to purge with pkcon…

[oshunluvr]

I have confidence in you!

[Schwarzer Kater]

Thanks! And I think I did get it right now:

As pkcon does not provide "purge" of any kind AFAICT I now just pkcon remove --autoremove myprogram && apt-get remove --purge myprogram.
I didn't expect it - but this seems to work!

[claydoh]

Just remember that pkcon is just telling apt (or whatever a distro's native packaging tools are) to do stuff.

To muddy the water even more (just because I can ), Pkcon is telling Packagekit to tell apt what to do, if I understand the thing correctly.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I know, but it works nonetheless now. (nice colouring, btw! )