[Aptitude-devel] Bug#668912: aptitude marks random packages are manually installed.

[Mark Lodato]

I have this same problem.  Packages randomly appear as manually
installed.  This annoys me so much that I have set up a script to
monitor this.

$ cat /etc/apt/manual_package_update.sh
#!/bin/bash
FILE=/etc/apt/manual_packages
NEW=${FILE}.new
set -e
/usr/bin/apt-mark showmanual > $NEW
/usr/bin/diff -u0 $FILE $NEW | grep -v '^@@' || true
mv $NEW $FILE

$ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/03manual
DPkg::Post-Invoke      { "/etc/apt/manual_package_update.sh"; };

Shortly after setting up my new script, I caught apt-get causing this problem.

$ sudo apt-get purge xscreensaver gnome-screensaver
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-screensaver* xscreensaver*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 1,315 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 198378 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing gnome-screensaver ...
Purging configuration files for gnome-screensaver ...
Removing xscreensaver ...
/usr/bin/xscreensaver: No such file or directory
Purging configuration files for xscreensaver ...
/usr/bin/xscreensaver: No such file or directory
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus ...
--- /etc/apt/manual_packages    2012-08-13 20:17:53.517596821 -0400
+++ /etc/apt/manual_packages.new    2012-08-13 21:08:09.517625898 -0400
+base-files
+google-chrome-stable
+sessioninstaller
+xserver-common
+xserver-xorg-core

So, I don't think this is necessarily an issue with aptitude.