Absurd dependencies

Writing something in texinfo, it happens that I can’t use @subentry for the index. It seems Ubuntu 19.10 has an old texinfo. So I downloaded the latest and wanted to purge the old one. But:

$ sudo apt-get remove texinfo
[sudo] password for user: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
...
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  cantor-backend-octave dynare liboctave-dev lilypond lilypond-data matlab2tikz octave octave-bim octave-biosig octave-bsltl
  octave-cgi octave-communications octave-communications-common octave-control octave-data-smoothing octave-dataframe octave-dicom
  octave-divand octave-doctest octave-econometrics octave-financial octave-fits octave-fpl octave-fuzzy-logic-toolkit octave-ga
  octave-gdf octave-general octave-geometry octave-gsl octave-image octave-image-acquisition octave-instrument-control octave-interval
  octave-io octave-level-set octave-linear-algebra octave-lssa octave-ltfat octave-ltfat-common octave-mapping octave-miscellaneous
  octave-missing-functions octave-mpi octave-msh octave-mvn octave-nan octave-ncarray octave-netcdf octave-nlopt octave-nurbs
  octave-octclip octave-octproj octave-openems octave-optics octave-optim octave-optiminterp octave-parallel octave-pfstools
  octave-plplot octave-psychtoolbox-3 octave-quaternion octave-queueing octave-secs1d octave-secs2d octave-secs3d octave-signal
  octave-sockets octave-sparsersb octave-specfun octave-splines octave-statistics octave-stk octave-strings octave-struct
  octave-symbolic octave-tsa octave-vibes octave-vlfeat octave-vrml octave-zenity octave-zeromq texinfo texlive-full

Why? Why removing texinfo should bring down the whole texlive-full and whole pieces of octave and… WTF. Idiotic, nonsense dependencies.

So I will keep that old texinfo. And Ubuntu has one more angle to push me towards their personal nightmare (I mean, snaps).

SIINSCAE

SIINSCAE: Software Installation Is Not Software (default) Configuration And Execution.

Debian Wheezy, GNOME 3 and others small things

When my Ubuntu GNU/Linux distro received the "alert" that it wasn't supported anymore and the upgrade failed, instead of finding out why, first I tried to transform the distro into a LTS one (not totally successful because I had to downgrade too many packages), then I decided to compile what I "needed"; but my final thought is that it is not a good idea mixing automatically installed packages and packages compiled by you (out of the APT world), especially if you begin updating libs which many other programs rely on, or if you compile the last version of a program that needs the last version of a "core" lib. To make it short, the system started to behave inconsistently (maybe since I circumvented some dependency…). Time for a brand new installation.