Bug#1113974: ITP: apt-suggest-auto -- Suggests and optionally marks manually installed packages as automatic

[Stephan Lachnit <stephanlachnit@debian.org>]

Thanks a lot for this! I have wanting to do something similar for a
while since I had some bug in apt-mark which marked all packages from
i386 as manually installed.

Cheers,
Stephan

On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 9:35 PM Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
> Owner: Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org>
> X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
>
> * Package name    : apt-suggest-auto
>   Version         : 0.1
>   Upstream Contact: Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org>
> * URL             : https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/apt-suggest-auto
> * License         : GPL-2.0-or-later
>   Programming Lang: Python
>   Description     : Suggests and optionally marks manually installed packages as automatic
>
>  apt-suggest-auto is a tool designed to help manage installed packages by
>  identifying those that were manually installed but could be marked as
>  automatically installed. This is particularly useful for maintaining a
>  clean package list and ensuring that packages serving solely as
>  dependencies are correctly flagged. It is aimed as a replacement for tools
>  like debfoster or deborphan.
>
> Currently it lives at https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/apt-suggest-auto
> (but the package is not ready for upload yet).
>
> That functionality should be added to APT at some point. Initially I
> wanted to wait until this is included in APT, and there's an MR
> at https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/merge_requests/502 .
> But (0) I find myself using the python version quite frequently;
> (1) there's still some work to do before the MR gets merged;
> (2) it's still useful as a separate tool in the meantime, to be able to
> backport the tool to stable releases and perform cleanup before
> upgrades.
>