Debian Specific Quick Question

How do I remove packages including the unnecessary dependencies? apt-get auto remove doesn't work. Lets say for example I wanted to remove empathy. I would type "apt-get remove empathy",but that doesn't uninstall the dependencies.

 

u can use synaptic package manager for that..
actually here is as link that should help:
http://www.mygnulinux.com/?p=43

 

The thing is, the dependencies aren't just limited to use by Empathy, other things depend on them as well.

 

deborphan will show you which packages are no longer depended upon, deborphan --guess-all will list more packages, but potential mess up your system if you pipe this into apt-get remove $(deborphan).

apt-get autoremove should do it, if you use aptitude remove packagename it should automatically remove unneeded dependencies. The equivalents to purge (remove config files etc -- can be dangerous!) would be:
apt-get --purge autoremove and aptitude --purge-unused remove packagename

The only way it would end up not removing those dependencies (if they aren't required by some other package) is if you had one set to 'manually installed,' for example if you manually installed a dependency before installing a package that depended on it. There is no easy way to find those. You can have a look at this thread which has some scripts, but they are cheaphax.