[ale] just installed LibreOffice in Linux, should have been easier

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2011-03-14 at 00:54 -0400, Ron Frazier wrote:
> Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to get rid of LibreOffice (which
> I don't) is there a way to identify the master package, so to speak?
> A Synaptic search yields 22 items.  Nothing jumps out as being a
> master record.  There's no mention of it in the application in
> Software Center.

There is no "master".  However, if you installed it using a single
package that then pulled all of the other packages, you can easily
remove it with a command line thus:

$ sudo aptitude --purge purge main-package-that-pulled-the-others

This will purge the main package (e.g., the one that you used to pull
all of the other ones) and it will purge any other associated packages
that are *automatically* installed *and* have no other dependencies.

I'm not sure that there is a way to directly translate that into a GUI
with a reasonable number of steps.  The packaging systems on (most)
distributions are quite a bit more flexible than the packaging scheme
that Microsoft uses (that is, the Windows Installer package management
system, also known by some as the MSI package management system).

	--- Mike