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

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 26 July 2012 22:19, dE . <de.techno at gmail.com> wrote:
> This bug persists to a smaller extent with apt-get also. Now I have to
> maintain a list of packages I manually installed and have to fix the list of
> manually installed packages every time I run a PM.

Can you provide more detail about which apt-get commands are doing this?

The intended behaviour for apt-get is that any package explicitly
mentioned on the command line will be marked manual, even if it was
previously installed and marked auto.  If my memory serves me
correctly, this is to avoid surprises when

 # apt-get install A

is used to upgrade A, which is previously auto-installed, and could
indirectly result in that package being removed due to dependencies
for example.

If that describes your scenario then it is not a bug in apt-get.

This behaviour may eventually be adopted in aptitude as well due to
the high number of bugs/complaints about the problem resolver
disregarding the list of packages on the command line.