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 empathyI had to find out, this version of empathy doesn't work well in Gnome 2.x. Therefore I mentioned:apt-get purge empathyapt-get install empathyHoping, that this will reinstall the standard version of empathy again.So far, everything worked well.But now:apt-get autoremovewants to delete Gnome as a whole.How can I calm down apt-get autoremove?
apt-get - autoremove wants to uninstall Gnome
debian;apt
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:On the command line, call aptitude unmarkauto PACKAGENAME to mark PACKAGENAME as manually installed, or markauto to mark it as automatically installed.In Aptitude, move to the line corresponding to a package, then press m to mark it as manually installed, or M to mark it as automatically installed.In Synaptic, move to the line corresponding to a package, then toggle Automatically installed in the Package menu.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 had gnome-desktop-environment installed, and removing the empathy package had to remove it because of the dependency. If this is the case you should now reinstall gnome-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 done apt-get -t wheezy empathy to install the wheezy version.