Friday, March 18, 2022

The Unexpected Thoroughness of `tasksel remove`

I decided to cut down a little on the number of packages installed on my Ubuntu Studio 21.10 system, so I tried running a command.  I'm pretty sure I asked for removal of ubuntustudio-video only, but I don't really know... whatever I ran proceeded to thoroughly remove most of the ubuntustudio meta packages, including ubuntustudio-audio—the prime reason for the system to exist—and even ubuntustudio-desktop itself.  Other notable packages caught in the crossfire were sddm and dkms.

Of course, as soon as I saw ardour6 being uninstalled early on, I mashed Ctrl+C, but it has no effect on tasksel.  Rude.

The damage to sddm was fairly simple and obvious: the display went black mid-process.  It took down the desktop session and Konsole with it, but tasksel continued on its path of complete destruction.  The loss of dkms is much more concerning; had I not noticed, at some point, I would have rebooted into a new kernel, and then I wouldn't have had WiFi anymore, with no idea why.

I had carefully requested a test run from tasksel first, except that it didn't actually list out packages, just a vague apt command in a format I'd never seen before.  That failed to adequately prepare me for what really happened.

(I got everything back using the text console.  Except I didn't bother with ubuntustudio-video.  Mission successful?)

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