I have made a small mistake, and I try to make a point of apologizing if I ever put something on here that isn’t 100 percent correct. I consider it an issue of integrity.
As shown earlier, here are the dependencies for Mirage.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gconf2 gconf2-common gnome-keyring gnome-mime-data gnome-mount hal hal-info libart-2.0-2 libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libavahi-glib1 libbonobo2-0 libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common libenchant1c2a libgconf2-4 libgnome-keyring0 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common libgnomecanvas2-0 libgnomecanvas2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0 libgnomevfs2-common libgnomevfs2-extra libhal-storage1 libhal1 libidl0 libnotify1 liborbit2 libsexy2 libwnck-common libwnck18 libxres1 mirage notification-daemon python-gconf python-gnome2 python-gnomecanvas python-pyorbit
0 packages upgraded, 43 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 7851kB of archives. After unpacking 48.1MB will be used
These are also the dependencies for Mirage.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
mirage
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 68.0kB of archives.
After unpacking 459kB of additional disk space will be used.
The difference is that the first list was generated by aptitude, and the second by apt-get. I usually endorse the use of aptitude because it handles dependencies better, and makes it easier to completely remove software from your machine.
Now I can see that it handles recommended packages differently too. I’m guessing that all the Gnome underpinnings are pulled in by python-gnome2 — a recommended package — even if they’re not required for normal use.
Regardless, this means I should apologize for calling the packaging “asinine,” because I exhibited a little ignorance on my own part, on how aptitude and apt-get behave individually. 😳 And now, if you will excuse me, I have a little research to do — and a small portion of crow to eat, as well. 😦
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Hello 🙂
Start aptitude in a terminal > Option > Dependency handling 😉
Aptitude installs recommends by default.
😀 That’s what I needed. From the command line it’s something like
--with(out)-recommends Specify whether or not to treat recommends as strong dependenciesI’m still tinkering with it, but I’m learning.
I always used apt for some reason. For me there was always something magical about saying:
apt-get install packagename
and watching Ubuntu doing it’s thing, rather than expanding the package tree in aptitude.
sudo aptitude install aptitude-doc-en
and read /usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/index.html in your favorite browser.
@ Luke: aptitude works from the command line too (that’s mostly what I am using).
Try using apt-cache:
apt-cache show mirage
In the output will be the actual list of dependencies for the package from the package itself, for me it was:
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.5-0ubuntu1), python-central (>= 0.5.8), python (<= 2.4), python-gtk2 (>= 2.6.0)