[Daniel Burrows] > you'd have to do something like "aptitude keep ~Rdepends:^gnome$".
Too arcane. (: I've occasionally wanted a simple command in aptitude for "remove the auto flag from all the depends of this package" - not only for metapackages but also for dummy upgrade packages. Another way to look at it is a combined command for "remove this package but arrange not to remove anything it pulled in". This seems a bit better to me than unconditionally keeping dependencies of removed metapackages, as Bug #328441 suggests.
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