I'm in a situation where apt shows 1000+ packages on my system marked as auto-removable. Amongst those are many that I know I need. I've resolved the situation by setting those to manually installed. But that results in almost half the packages in my system showing up as 'manually installed'. I ran into trouble when upgrading my system to the current stable version of Debian (apt-get dist-upgrade), and none of the 'manually installed' packages were upgraded. Again, I resolved the situation by setting all the 'manually installed' packages to automatically installed. That made the upgrade possible. But now all the upgraded, formerly 'manually installed' packages are again auto-removable. I tried finding not installed meta-packages that through their dependencies would at least reduce the auto-removable list. But without success. - Is there no way to get back to a situation where the packages marked as auto-removable are really those I don't need?
important debian packages auto-removable
apt