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

[Nigel Ridley]

D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> 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.

Here's something:
You gave me a thought and did:
'sudo apt-get install gimp' (gimp was one of the packages that apt 
wanted me to autoremove) - here is the output and my next command 
(solution?):

nigel at nigels:~$ sudo apt-get install gimp
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
gimp is already the newest version.
gimp set to manual installed.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer 
required:
   libgsf-1-common libcroco3 librsvg2-2 libgsf-1-114
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
nigel at nigels:~$ sudo apt-get install libgsf-1-common libcroco3 
librsvg2-2 libgsf-1-114
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libgsf-1-common is already the newest version.
libgsf-1-common set to manual installed.
libcroco3 is already the newest version.
libcroco3 set to manual installed.
librsvg2-2 is already the newest version.
librsvg2-2 set to manual installed.
libgsf-1-114 is already the newest version.
libgsf-1-114 set to manual installed.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
nigel at nigels:~$ sudo apt-get install neverball
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
neverball is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
nigel at nigels:~$

So it would seem that all one needs to do is manually install the 
packages that apt wants you to autoremove (without needing to 
uninstall/remove them first) - you can highlight the entire list in the 
consol window, type 'sudo apt-get install ' (with the added space) and 
then middle mouse button to paste the entire list, then hit enter.
Apt will then tell you that they are all the lasted versions and after 
that leave you alone!!

Blessings,

Nigel

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