pombredanne / packages-keep

Tool for maintaining Debian Linux apt package manually-installed status

packages-keep

Maintain apt's (the package manager in Debian Linux) manually-installed status by keeping a separate configuration file /etc/apt/packages.keep.

This tries to address the following problems in apt-get autoremove:

• Using apt-get marks packages manually installed. However, often you install several packages and figure out soon that they don't do what you want. How do you remember which packages you played with?

• State information is kept in /var/lib/apt/extended_states, which is not completely human-friendly.

For this reason it is useful to keep the 'is this package wanted' information in a separate file which is updated only manually. There are also other similar tools such as debfoster, but it is cleaner to use the feature built in apt.