How To Make a metapackage
The reason a metapackage is nice is because anything listed as a depend will not be removed by
sudo apt-get autoremove or ubuntu's "Janitor" application once our metapackage is installed.
make a folder called masonux-9.10-meta at ~.
make a folder inside that called
DEBIAN.
make a file inside ~/masonux-9.10-meta/DEBIAN called
control.
contents of ~/masonux-9.10-meta/DEBIAN/control:
Package: masonux-9.10-meta
Essential: yes
Section: metapackages
Maintainer: Chris Mason <mason.christopher.thomas@gmail.com>
Architecture: i386
Version: 9.10.1
Depends: librpmbuild0, mobile-broadband-provider-info, libxmmsclient5, unzip, manpages-dev, lxde-icon-theme, xscreensaver, librpmio0, librpm0, update-notifier-common, leafpad, lxde-common, lxrandr, libgnome-bluetooth7, dnsmasq-base, pcmanfm, lxsession-edit, lxde-core, arj, gtk2-engines, lxinput, lxappearance, lxmenu-data, xdg-utils, rpm, xmms2-core, gpicview, zip, lxshortcut, lxpanel, lxde-settings-daemon, miscfiles, libjpeg-progs, desktop-file-utils, p7zip-full, libmenu-cache0, xscreensaver-data, libxmmsclient-glib1, modemmanager, xarchiver
Description: This metapackage exists to prevent "sudo apt-get autoremove" and similar from removing things that shouldn't be removed.
For the stuff listed after
Depends, you just copy/paste/reformat what apt-get is incorrectly telling you "is no longer needed and can be removed bla bla".
from ~,
run dpkg -b masonux-9.10-meta.
then, to install it, run
sudo dpkg -i masonux-9.10-meta.deb.