Remove Xarchiver package without removing whonix packages?

[Patrick]

That page explains is generically for any package which is affected by this. xarchiver is part of a meta package (kicksecure-desktop-applications-xfce). Also not easy to uninstall other applications which such as xchat, keepassxc, vlc and others (dependency of whonix-workstation-packages-recommended-gui).

Please specifically see Debian Packages - Whonix and then follow all links.

Debian packages support only Recommends: or Depends:. There is nothing in the middle. The missing feature is:

Weak-Depends: list of packages that gets installed when using apt --no-install-recommends but any package listed there can be removed without removing the package which referenced the Weak-Depends:

The related forum discussion:

Issues with removal of specific packages by users / builders

It is a real pity. Now that Whonix’s functionality is split into multiple packages, which made Whonix’s source code much simpler to grasp, we still cannot tell users who wish to remove certain functionality to simply uninstall the package. Each package still needs a mechanism to disable its functionality while being enabled. For example, a common use case were users wish to tunnel all their traffic through something… ( Combining Tunnels with Tor ) uwt ( GitHub - Whonix/uwt ) is a common source…