I prepared a new apt upload that will explicitly exclude all direct dependencies from meta-packages from being marked as automatic installs. This should fix a lot of the confusion seen here.
In addition to this I have attached a fixup script that will mark the current direct dependencies of installed meta-packages as manual installed. It will make a copy of your old state file in /var/lib/apt/extended_states.fixup-save so if anything goes wrong, you can still copy it back.
The script requires the latest python-apt to work.
Please test it and let me know if that fixes the issues at hand.
Thanks for your bugreport.
I prepared a new apt upload that will explicitly exclude all direct dependencies from meta-packages from being marked as automatic installs. This should fix a lot of the confusion seen here.
In addition to this I have attached a fixup script that will mark the current direct dependencies of installed meta-packages as manual installed. It will make a copy of your old state file in /var/lib/ apt/extended_ states. fixup-save so if anything goes wrong, you can still copy it back.
The script requires the latest python-apt to work.
Please test it and let me know if that fixes the issues at hand.
Thanks,
Michael