No way to view explicity installed packages, excluding automatically installed packages

Yes, I hit this barrier as well. Additionally there is no column "automatically installed" configurable. I had to use aptitude since it at least displays the automatically flag.

As a workaround, I've attached a script that outputs a list of all packages that are not auto-installed. Here is some sample output:

can_be_marked_as_auto acpi
can_be_marked_as_auto acpi-support
can_be_marked_as_auto acpid
can_be_marked_as_auto adduser
can_be_marked_as_auto alacarte
can_be_marked_as_auto alsa-base
can_be_marked_as_auto alsa-utils
can_be_marked_as_auto amarok-xine
can_be_marked_as_auto anacron
no_dependents apache2
can_be_marked_as_auto apmd
can_be_marked_as_auto app-install-data
no_dependents app-install-data-commercial
can_be_marked_as_auto apparmor
no_dependents apparmor-utils
can_be_marked_as_auto apport
no_dependents apport-gtk
no_dependents apt-rdepends
can_be_marked_as_auto aptitude
can_be_marked_as_auto apturl

The text "no_dependents" indicates that no packages depend on the listed package. These packages can (supposedly) be removed without affecting any other package.

The text "can_be_marked_as_auto" indicates that at least one other package depends on the listed package. These packages can be marked as being automatically installed (via Synaptic by going to Package..Automatically installed or via aptitude by pressing Shift-M).

The script is really slow because there is no fast and reliable way to get reverse dependencies for a package.

Do the custom filters in synaptic in Jaunty meet your needs, or do you still need an enhancement?

It is not possible to show only non-automatically installed packages using custom filters in Jaunty's Synaptic.

Thank you for your bug submission. There is enough information for a developer to start working on this. Please report any other bugs/requests you may have.

This bug was fixed in the package synaptic - 0.62.7ubuntu3

---------------
synaptic (0.62.7ubuntu3) karmic; urgency=low

  * common/rpackagelister.cc:
    - add prefixes for "name" and "section" in the quick search
      This allows "name:apt" or "section:devel" searches
  * debian/control:
    - recommends gksu|kdebase-bin (kdsu is fine too)
      closes: #442421
  * add filter for manual installed packages (LP: #122047)
  * fix typo (thanks to Florentin Duneau), closes: #542122
  * po/pt_BR.po:
    - updated translation, thanks to Sergio Cipolla
      (closes: #532473)
  * common/rpackage.{cc,h}:
    - fix potential segfault

 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:52:17 +0200

a7x, you may be either happy or dismayed to know that you can obtain a nearly identical (and more accurate, for reasons that I didn't feel like investigating) result using:

aptitude --disable-columns -F 'can_be_marked_as_auto %p' search '~i!~M~R(~i)'
aptitude --disable-columns -F 'no_dependents %p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)'

You can refer to http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/projects/aptitude/doc/en/ch02s03s05.html for the meanings of the search string - ~R(~i) matches packages whose reverse depends are installed on the system.

However, it's better to use:

aptitude --disable-columns -F 'can_be_marked_as_auto %p' search '~i!~M (~R(~i)|~Rrecommends:(~i))'
aptitude --disable-columns -F 'no_dependents %p' search '~i!~M !(~R(~i)|~Rrecommends:(~i))'

The above includes recommends as well as depends, which is how aptitude calculates which packages to remove anyway.

A tabular list of all manually installed packages can be obtained using:
aptitude search '~i!~M'