Bug#1068774: (No Subject)
> And I tried to explain to you that many others believe in the exact opposite
Sure, I'm aware of that. Once again, this is about kept-back packages. When kept-back packages in specific are installed through apt-get install, then that is usually not because the user wanted to mark them as manually installed, something many don't even know exists at all or for years, but because they want to solve the problem shown when upgrading their packages. Those who actually want to mark it as manually installed *for kept-back packages* could still do so.
I'm not complaining, just pointing out an issue and that issue may not be clear to those who used Debian and apt-get for years/decades and for example assume that the users know everything they know or should be required to (and that right from the time of their first upgrade problems).
Another option would be to display a prompt like "The following packages have been kept back ... If you want to install them as if they were dependencies, run sudo apt-get install --fix-held-back ..." so that the user just runs that instead of the normal install command but I don't think it would be as good as the thing proposed here for example because such a command doesn't exist.
I think any issues you bring up that could, probably rarely, exist if the package is not marked as manually installed could be solved and they also exist for solutions like the top recommendation (--with-new-pkgs) in the top answers here https://askubuntu.com/questions/601/the-following-packages-have-been-kept-back-why-and-how-do-i-solve-it
> Your sysv-rc-conf is kinda an example: A normal upgrade doesn't do it because it is deemed not a good idea to prefer this over 20 other
packages
I guess I just remove it. But why does require so many packages to be removed, seems like it would need to be upgraded properly so it doesn't require that?
> That is an explicit manual install request for some-pkg.
Fair point, but then please change it so that the process of resolving kept-back is different. That could be a prompt the user needs to confirm, a prompt displaying another command the user could run (or several options), or something else. Basically this issue is broadly about how kept-back packages are installed with the only best feasible solution I came up with being that the install command simply doesn't mark them manually installed by default (except if for example a parameter is used). Yes, having a choice there would be good but if you're referring to the other issue with that, this one is only about kept-back package installation (that is ways that treat these different from any other package installations such as running certain code if it detected it to be a kept-back package).
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