Comment 6 for bug 512481

SimonP (peeters-simon) wrote:
> the problem is here that synaptic automatically installs
> ALL (also the dependencies of a selected package) packages
> as being "manually installed"

If that was ever true, it certainly is no longer the case.

BeowulfOF (beowulfof) wrote:
> But the whole system is not installed by synaptic, is it?

No, it is not. The base packages are installed in two or more phases. In Debian, this uses:
- debootstrap, which installs a very few packages;
- tasksel, which installs perhaps many packages.

All such packages are marked manually installed, at least in the past.

Recently both Debian and Ubuntu move to using task packages to handle the default set of packages, and this should reduce the amount of noise you see on a *freshly installed* desktop system. This means that only those packages installed in the first phase (debootstrap) will be marked manual, plus a very few packages like ‘task-desktop’.

There have also been problems with e.g. upgrading packages marks them as manually installed. Most such issues have been resolved.

It is a kind of systemic problem that has been resolved quite a bit recently, though perhaps not fully. It is not a bug in synaptic per se, so I am marking the task as invalid. However, developers are quite aware of the general issue and working to resolve the few remaining pieces.