APT Is Nagging Me To Remove Things I Don't Want To Remove

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Saturday 26 January 2008, Dave Vincenty wrote:

> Here's something I've wanted to ask for a while.
>
> Okay, I've been  getting a message when I run "apt-get":

The others are probably right about the origin of this kind of thing.  I just 
saw the same phenomenon myself when I had to temporarily uninstall 
the "ubuntustudio-audio" metapackage.

Here's what I do to deal with this phenomenon.  First, find something you know 
you don't really want to get rid of.  With this list, I'd pick "kde" first.  
Then install the "kde" metapackage explicitly.  That will install a lot of 
this back, or if it's still installed, you'll see some message to the effect 
of "changing status from automatically installed to manually installed" for 
each package whose status changes.  (Wording is probably wrong, but the 
spirit is right.)

After you hit the big one that cuts the list down to something more 
manageable, look at the list again, and keep adding things back in as they 
occur to you.

After you snag everything you know you don't want to get rid of, odds are you 
will also pull tons of weird looking nonsense back in along with these known 
packages.  After all of that is said and done, maybe you really will be left 
with a few package you no longer need, and then you can safely autoremove 
those.

In the worst case, if you realize a couple months from now that you really did 
need libdingleblatz9-dev, you can always reinstall it.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre