setup graphical chooser : how to list orphaned packages ?

[Ken Brown]

On 10/13/2017 3:49 PM, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2017-10-13 13:37, Achim Gratz wrote:
>> Jérôme Bouat writes:
>>> Are "orphans" and "obsolete" 2 different things ?
>>
>> Yes.  An orphaned package is one that is installed on your system, but
>> not available in any version from setup.  An obsolete package is one
>> that still exists (usually as an empty package) both in setup and on
>> your system in order to provide a dependency (usually for older packages
>> that still refer to the obsolete package name until they can get
>> rebuilt).
> 
> Obsolete packages are also provided in setup like "virtual" packages for
> backward compatibility with old package names requiring the new package.
> 
> I recently removed some of these old obsolete packages as I was using the
> upgraded packages.
> 
> The next time I ran setup for an upgrade to the underlying package, the obsolete
> package and obsolete library package were "reinstalled", along with the upgraded
> real package and library package!?

This is very common.  Suppose you have package A installed, which 
requires B.  Package B gets obsoleted by C.  But A still requires B 
until someone (usually the maintainer of A) changes this to make A 
require C instead.

Ken

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