Aptitude wants to remove tons of packages

Question

I've used the search engine but do not manage to find a simple answer to this simple question:

How to avoid aptitude wanting to deinstall tons of packages when a simple upgrade of a single package would suffice?

Can you give more details on your problem?. Which packages? Which dependencies? — Ortomala Lokni
– Ortomala Lokni, Commented Feb 21, 2015 at 17:56
It is not about specific dependencies. It is about general aptitude resolver behaviour. It always wants to remove instead of upgrading. — Envite
– Envite, Commented Feb 24, 2015 at 2:39
@Envite Maybe this is the behavior on your system but this is not always the case. If you want an anwser you must provide more details. — Ortomala Lokni
– Ortomala Lokni, Commented Mar 2, 2015 at 17:27
-1 | For you have not included any version (text or visual) of the command you have used and the result. — Vlastimil Burián
– Vlastimil Burián, Commented Dec 24, 2018 at 10:58

Epskampie · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-24 09:10:58Z

Sometimes when aptitude wants to remove a lot of packages is because they are not marked as manual but automatic (indicated with an A).

Automatic packages get autoremoved when they are no longer needed.

You can mark the ones you want to to keep as manual to prevent this. In the menu: package > mark manual.

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