As empathy 2.30 in Debian Wheezy didn't meet all my preferences I tried out empathy 3.1 from experimental, using the command:
apt-get -t experimental install empathy
I had to find out, this version of empathy doesn't work well in Gnome 2.x. Therefore I mentioned:
apt-get purge empathy
apt-get install empathy
Hoping, that this will reinstall the "standard" version of empathy again.
So far, everything worked well.
But now:
apt-get autoremove
wants to delete Gnome as a whole.
How can I calm down apt-get autoremove
?
Best Answer
APT maintains an indicator for each package, telling it whether the package is manually installed (installed because the user/administrator wanted it) or automatically installed (installed only because it's a dependency of some other package). That's what
apt-get autoremove
uses to determine what to remove: it removes packages that are marked as automatically installed, but that no currently installed package requires.You need to mark the
gnome
package, or whatever Gnome package corresponds to the bits you want to keep, as manually installed. It's easiest to do this in an interactive tool with access to the automatically-installed setting:aptitude unmarkauto PACKAGENAME
to mark PACKAGENAME as manually installed, ormarkauto
to mark it as automatically installed.m
to mark it as manually installed, orM
to mark it as automatically installed.Note that (at least as of squeeze, I haven't checked wheezy)
gnome-desktop-environment
depends on all of the official Gnome components, including empathy. I suspect you hadgnome-desktop-environment
installed, and removing theempathy
package had to remove it because of the dependency. If this is the case you should now reinstallgnome-desktop-environment
. (If you don't remember, you can find a history of what APT-based package managers did in/var/log/apt
.)Instead of purging and installing
empathy
, you could have just doneapt-get -t wheezy empathy
to install the wheezy version.