apt-get remove wants to remove too much?

[lhalweg]

I'm trying to clean up a fresh debian sid install on my laptop. When using the following, apt wants to remove kde or gnome?

sudo apt-get remove abiword-common
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
abiword-common abiword-gnome gnome gnome-office
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 13.3MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

I just want to remove a few unwanted games, apps, etc....

[retsaw]

I believe Gnome and Gnome-office are just meta-packages, that is they don't contain any programs themselves but are just there to call in other packages as dependancies which makes it a lot easier to install large collections of packages like gnome without having to select lots of individual packages yourself. Presumably gnome has gnome-office as a dependancy and gnome-office has abiword as a dependancy.

[sharth]

retsaw is correct. (in other words, you're not really getting rid of anything but abiword).

[lhalweg]

I will let it process here in a little while.

Thanks for the quick response.

[sharth]

Just as a side note, you might want to run apt-get upgrade and perhaps apt-get dist-upgrade.

There's 5 packages on your system that could be upgraded.

[davisfactor]

I haven't used this feature in a long time, but you can 'hold' packages so apt-get won't touch them.

Put <package> on hold (command line method)
echo "<package> hold" | dpkg --set-selections

You can use dpkg --get-selections to see the status of your packages. A quick dpkg --get-selections | grep -v install will show you all packages that are not in the install state.

You can try that to see if you can prevent packages from uninstalling along with other ones.