Debian – Why is the “harden” suite of packages not available for Debian Jessie (8.0)

I don't know of a one-stop command line solution, although all the tools exist (apt-cache depends --installed, apt-cache rdepends --installed --recurse, apt-mark showmanual, dpigs, etc.). It would be possible to hack together a command line script that could attempt to find large packages with few manually installed reverse dependencies. Here's the proof of concept I used as a starting point:

dpigs | awk 'NR == 1 {print $2}' | xargs apt-cache rdepends --installed --important --recurse | awk '!/:/ {print $1}' | sort -u

On the other hand, if you want to do complex analysis of the graph in multiple directions (e.g., what set of manually installed packages has the largest on-disk overlapping set of recursive dependencies), it can quickly get out of hand. At that point, you'll probably need to look at something more customizable (awk or python?).

Full Disclosure: I have contributed to the project below. If that kind of thing matters to you, please take it into account. If I were aware of a similar project that were already in the Debian repositories, I would probably post that instead.

While I prefer to do everything from the command line, you might find pacgraph (also on github) a useful alternative. It was originally written by Kyle Keen for Arch Linux, but it's now compatible with deb- and rpm- based systems as well. I used to have some sample output from an Ubuntu system, but I can't find it, so here's an example from his web site:

.

It's been a while since I've used it, but I believe there are also flags to highlight a particular package, with different colors for its recursive dependencies and reverse dependencies.

I don't understand why you are doing here. Why do you have a preferences setting for stable at all if you are running a stable system? As far I know, no preferences setting is necessary for stable in that case.

You don't explicitly say whether you are running a stable system (you really should say so), but if you are not, then I really have no idea what you are doing.

And if the release is on stable, then the usual thing to do for testing and unstable is to set their preferences to less than 100. I usually use 50.

And if you want to downgrade to stable, just do the following (assuming sane settings like the ones above) to downgrade pkgname1 and pkgname2:

apt-get install pkgname1/stable pkgname2/stable

This sets the specified packages to the target release stable.

Incidentally, mixing testing and/or unstable packages with an unstable system is generally a bad idea unless you know what you are doing. Some of the time it is Ok, but most of the time you need to use backports, either from Debian, or self-made.