How should one deal with "The following package disappeared from your system..."?

Question

On dpkg-/apt-based systems, it is possible to encounter a message such as the following:

The following package disappeared from your system as
all files have been overwritten by other packages:
  qfdevelopment_metapkg
Note: This is done automatically and on purpose by dpkg.

What does this even mean? How should we deal with it?

In this case, qfdevelopment_metapkg is an apt package that contains only dependencies in order to install the necessary packages prior to performing development for the qf project. I had installed the package (originally) using:

sudo dpkg -i qfdevelopment_metapkg-0.3.8-Linux.deb
sudo apt install -f

I am eager to know how others deal with this, since I don't understand the workaround that I fumbled through (which I'll list if it does not come up in answers).

Answer 1

Why we should care: this issue manifests when a sudo apt-get upgrade helpfully offers that autoremove will remove all of the just added packages - because the package that depends on them was removed.

Workaround

It seems that this results from the package not installing anything. I solved the problem by adding a trivial script that I install into the bin directory:

INSTALL(PROGRAMS ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/list_qf_dev_info DESTINATION bin)

The contents of this list_qf_dev_info script are just:

#! /bin/sh

apt-cache show qfdevelopment_metapkg

Now, after installing, the presence of this script causes the apt/deb system to keep the package instead of automatically causing it to disappear.

Alternate workaround - without editing deb

A different workaround - that does not require modifying the deb - is to just install again at the end to get things squared away:

sudo dpkg -i qfdevelopment_metapkg-0.3.8-Linux.deb
sudo apt install -f
sudo dpkg -i qfdevelopment_metapkg-0.3.8-Linux.deb

PS

I had forgotten about this issue as I had worked unrelated items. Today I was running into the issue again and was briefly excited to see somebody had asked before realizing it's my question and that there were no answers, so I had to fumble through it myself.