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When removing Transmission, it says:

To remove Transmission BitTorrent Client, these items must be removed as well: Ubuntu mate - full desktop.

What does this mean? Will the whole Ubuntu MATE be uninstalled or just a part of the MATE desktop?

Running Ubuntu MATE 15.04.

EDIT: apt-get remove --simulate transmission-gtk returned:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  linux-headers-3.19.0-15 linux-headers-3.19.0-15-generic
  linux-image-3.19.0-15-generic linux-image-extra-3.19.0-15-generic
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  transmission-gtk ubuntu-mate-desktop
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Remv ubuntu-mate-desktop [1.124]
Remv transmission-gtk [2.84-0.2ubuntu1]
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  • Not sure, but you could always try sudo dpkg -r --force-all transmission-gtk to be safe. That should not remove other dependant packages.
    – Chev_603
    Jun 18, 2015 at 6:14
  • @Chev_603 What do those things mean?
    – Ketchup901
    Jun 18, 2015 at 6:20
  • See this thread: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1513821 . Using dpkg -r --force-all should remove transmission without removing other programs that it depends on, so if you are concerned removing a package could break something, this may be a good approach.
    – Chev_603
    Jun 18, 2015 at 6:26
  • @DavidFoerster Updated.
    – Ketchup901
    Jun 18, 2015 at 9:11

1 Answer 1

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ubuntu-mate-desktop is the meta-package for the Ubuntu Mate distribution, which contains all dependencies to the default installed packages for Ubuntu Mate desktop environment. You can see all of its dependencies with dpkg --status ubuntu-mate-desktop | grep '^Depends:' or online.

If you are to remove one of the dependencies in that list, the meta-package does not any longer have all of its dependencies and must also be removed in order to have a consistent package-graph.

Consequences: If the meta-package is uninstalled, since it is only a meta-package, it wont do much, but, since you don’t have the meta-package any more, any additions to the meta-package (new dependencies) will not affect your system any more. So a dist-upgrade won’t add new applications to your Ubuntu installation if they are added to it.

The addition of new packages often happens when doing a release upgrade. So your system might be good as long as you are using 15.04, but I would reinstall the meta-package before eventually upgrading to 15.10.

Also, the meta-package is the package, that marks a dependency to other packages. In earlier versions of Ubuntu, apt-get autoremove could accidentally mark packages, that is not installed directly, as unused, thus marking them for uninstallation. This should have been fixed in 15.04, so it will probably not affect you.

You can read more about meta-packages.

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  • So it won't uninstall the preinstalled software such as Firefox or LibreOffice?
    – Ketchup901
    Jun 18, 2015 at 9:18
  • Not directly no - but there if you run apt-get autoremove some packages that is no longer reffered to might be uninstalled. See man apt-get autoremove autoremove is used to remove packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for some package and that are no more needed.
    – stalet
    Jun 18, 2015 at 9:28

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