UX/UI: apk should perhaps give some clues or find out on its own how to remove a temporarily installed testing package, when it causes lingering dependencies

First of all, I realize the following is meant to cause problems that the average users can't solve, and is a command you're not meant to run. It's therefore a self-inflicted problem on my behalf, for sure.

With that out of the way, I still feel like apk could handle this scenario better with at least some hints on how to proceed, when 1. installing a testing package via apk add ... --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing that pulls in further testing packages, 2. then simply uninstalling that package again right away:

1. This is what I did to install, fairly straightforward:

   # apk add libguestfs --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing/
   The following NEW packages will be installed:
     libburn libguestfs libisoburn libisofs xorriso xwaylandvideobridge
   Need to download 1108 KiB of packages.
   After this operation, 2836 KiB of additional disk space will be used.
   Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
   (1/6) Installing libburn (1.5.6-r0)
   (2/6) Installing libisofs (1.5.6-r0)
   (3/6) Installing libisoburn (1.5.6-r0)
   (4/6) Installing xorriso (1.5.6-r0)
   (5/6) Installing libguestfs (1.52.0-r1)
   (6/6) Installing xwaylandvideobridge (0.4.0-r1)
   Executing busybox-1.37.0-r8.trigger
   Executing gtk-update-icon-cache-3.24.43-r2.trigger
   Executing desktop-file-utils-0.28-r0.trigger
   OK: 9389 MiB in 1952 packages
   # apk add libguestfs-dev --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing/
   The following NEW packages will be installed:
     libguestfs-dev
   Need to download 29 KiB of packages.
   After this operation, 236 KiB of additional disk space will be used.
   Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
   (1/1) Installing libguestfs-dev (1.52.0-r1)
   OK: 9389 MiB in 1953 packages
   #

2. Then the uninstall attempt:

   # apk del libguestfs libguestfs-dev libburn libisofs xorriso libguestfs xwaylandvideobridge --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing/
   World updated, but the following packages are not removed due to:
     xwaylandvideobridge: postmarketos-ui-plasma-desktop alpine-base postmarketos-base
                          postmarketos-base-ui postmarketos-base-ui-plasma
                          postmarketos-base-ui-networkmanager-usb-tethering
                          postmarketos-base-ui-networkmanager postmarketos-base-ui-flatpak flatpak
                          postmarketos-base-ui-bluez-openrc bluez-openrc
                          ...lots of other stuff listed here...
                          py3-jinja2 py3-lxml py3-pillow gdb device-generic-x86_64
                          postmarketos-base-ui-wifi-wpa_supplicant
   
   The following packages will be REMOVED:
     libburn libguestfs libguestfs-dev libisoburn libisofs xorriso
   After this operation, 2880 KiB of disk space will be freed.
   Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
   (1/6) Purging libguestfs-dev (1.52.0-r1)
   (2/6) Purging libguestfs (1.52.0-r1)
   (3/6) Purging xorriso (1.5.6-r0)
   (4/6) Purging libisoburn (1.5.6-r0)
   (5/6) Purging libburn (1.5.6-r0)
   (6/6) Purging libisofs (1.5.6-r0)
   Executing busybox-1.37.0-r8.trigger
   OK: 9386 MiB in 1947 packages
   #

My best guess for what happened is: inside the testing repository, one of the other listed non-testing packages has a dependency on xwaylandvideobridge which is only in the testing repository. When doing apk add xwaylandvideobridge --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing, apk seems to somehow also save that these non-testing packages will in the future depend on it (even though they weren't upgraded to the testing versions). Then when trying to remove xwaylandvideobridge again, apk perhaps doesn't have the necessarily solver trick to realize that when all the other packages that depend on it in the future are old enough in the present version, those dependencies can be safely ignored.

Whatever the case is, it would be nice if the solver for apk del somehow was familiar with this scenario of an upgraded package version having additional new dependencies, and e.g. offered to downgrade the other dependencies again (which isn't even needed here, i think) if that's needed to uninstall something, rather than not doing it.

changed the description

I think this could be fixed with apk upgrade --available.

Maybe some of the --available behaviour should become the default.

Woo that worked thanks! First, I used del which I assume marks it as somehow scheduled for removal, then I used upgrade --available and that did it:

# apk del xwaylandvideobridge
World updated, but the following packages are not removed due to:
  xwaylandvideobridge: postmarketos-ui-plasma-desktop alpine-base postmarketos-base
                       postmarketos-base-ui postmarketos-base-ui-plasma
                       ...lots of other stuff listed here...
                       postmarketos-base-ui-wifi-wpa_supplicant

After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
OK: 9395 MiB in 1946 packages
# apk upgrade --available
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  xwaylandvideobridge
After this operation, 192 KiB of disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(1/1) Purging xwaylandvideobridge (0.4.0-r1)
Executing busybox-1.37.0-r8.trigger
Executing gtk-update-icon-cache-3.24.43-r2.trigger
Executing desktop-file-utils-0.28-r0.trigger
OK: 9395 MiB in 1945 packages
#

changed the description

changed the description

I think in this case the xwaylandvideobridge is installed automatically due to an install_if.

Those do not get uninstalled unless the repository removed (which you did implicitly) and --available is specified.

The error message does look weird. It should not list that many packages. I suppose apk del should remove it also in this case: no longer available in repository and its kept installed by install_if and not a world dependency.

closed with commit 7b0b69a3