Adept allows removal of essential packages without warning

This sounds like adept allows the removal of apt without a big warning. It should print a big warning when packages of priority "important" or "essential" are marked for removal that this may break the system.

Currently reproducible in Gutsy. Adept allows removal without warning. In my opinion, this bug should be confirmed.

Agreed, this is an issue that needs some sorting. I'll see what I can do over the next week to get this one rolling.

I'm also wondering if this should be considered somewhat long the lines of a security issue. It's not a big security issue, but I could see how someone could present a user with a simple shell script telling them that their script would do something like install multimedia codecs, only to find out that it removed libc or something ridiculous like that.

This needs some degree of priority...

A closely related issue has to do with meta-packages. Try removing kdm in kubuntu. It will silently select "kubuntu-desktop". That's already bad enough. But even if we added a pop-up instead of quietly selecting the dependency (kubuntu-desktop), it wouldn't be good enough: the user doesn't necessarily know that kubuntu-desktop spans many hundreds packages ...

See here:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3088329.msg98114#msg98114

Cheers!
Leo

Actually, this article is kinda wrong on two fronts. First, the assumption is made that removing a package shouldn't remove all of the packages that depend on that package. If you remove ALSA, sorry, but everything that depends on ALSA should also be removed. That's not a bug, that's the package manager trying to make sure that it's keeping your system in good working condition.

Second, the assumption is made that just because kubuntu-desktop is being removed that every package included in that meta-package is also being removed. This assumption is false, as if you remove kubuntu-desktop as a side-effect of removing another package (e.g. kdm) only kdm and the meta-package kubuntu-desktop will be removed. Everything else stays put. This is nowhere near the issue that it is being made out to be in this forums post.

Also, if the user doesn't understand what they're removing, they shouldn't be removing it. Our alert to the user should probably say something to this affect so that it would remind users of sane system management practices. Adept is not the "Add/Remove Programs" functionality that you see in Windows, adept is a package manager that can manage *all* of the packages on your system. If a user wants add/remove programs functionality, they should be in Add/Remove Programs (e.g. adept_installer) and not in the Adept Manager. Using adept_manager is a system management task that needs to be taken seriously like any other system management task (e.g. configuring a firewall, backing up data, configuring user access and system services). It might be a good idea for us to stress that users only use adept_manager for things where they're managing their system, not when they're just trying to check out and/or remove software.

Sorry, I was wrong, removing kubuntu-desktop doesn't remove the packages that depend on this meta-package.

So, all we would need is a confirmation, pop-up window in Adept: when you do "Apply Changes", you get to see the info of the "Preview Changes" dialog, and you need to accept these changes. This will make it very explicit, and people will not remove packages by mistake ...

By the way, this is how Synaptic works ...

Thank you!

This seems like a duplicate of bug 55549. (This report has importance set though.)

Adept 3.0 makes you go to a preview screen to review your changes before committing them. I believe this satisfies the solution needed, as described in comment 6.