How to revert packages at their previous state?

Question

I've set all of my "manually installed" packages as "automatic installed". Now apt-get is saying several packages are not needed, and it suggests to use apt-get autoremove to get rid of them. Of course I want to mantain such packages and get rid of the message, so I suppose I need to revert them back to their previous status of manually installed.

I can't do it one by one, because they're too many.

How could I do?

Answer 1

Simply do an apt-get install <packagename> for each of the affected packages. They will then no longer be recommended to "autoremove".

Keep in mind: "automatic installed" means you didn't explicitly request them, but they have been drawn-in by dependencies (some other package declared it needed them). So if there's no longer a package which needs it, and you never wanted it in the first place, apt considers it as "obsolete".