Use case: User wants to understand what "apt-get purge" actually does to the system.
Running "apt-get --help" tell him that this command will "remove and purge packages".
This is not a very straight forward description. At least, I'm left with many questions.
Running "man apt-get" gives you a similar recursive definition of purge; it says that:
"purge is identical to remove except that packages are removed and purged"
What I wanted to know was:
1) What is the difference between "remove" and "purge"?
2) Does "purge" delete program files from the disk?
3) Does "purge" delete configuration files from the disk?
4) Does "purge" also delete all packages that depend on the one that I'm purging?
Note: I already know the answer to all of these questions. This bug is about improving the built-in documentation.
Having a recursive definition of purge in both --help and "man" makes it hard to learn about this command.
Could you please suggest some alternate text that would be less confusing as documentation? Raw text would be acceptable, although a patch more likely to be adopted quickly.