Currently I am running Wheezy 32-bit, and recently I installed FreeSWITCH from the official repos. However, I realized that for the purpose I had in mind, I needed to rebuild FreeSWITCH myself, from source, which is somewhat newer than the binary release no. installed.Just to be sure that I can reinstall/reuse the FreeSWITCH binaries from official repos at a later date, without having to fetch the package .deb files again (which took quite a while on my slow connection)  I wanted to thus uninstall, while keeping the package files in apt cache. How can I achieve this ?Also, the FreeSWITCH package installation was done using a meta-package (i.e. freeswitch-meta-vanilla) which pulled in all the other FreeSWITCH package. Would I need to perform this uninstall differently ?
Uninstalling software packages, without removing the downloaded .deb in apt-cache?
debian;package management;apt;aptitude
I found this thread on the ubuntuforums titled: HOWTO: Make and restore apt cache backups. apt's cacheWhen you install .deb files on Ubuntu/Debian they get stored in the following directory, /var/cache/apt/archives/. So you can copy them out of here at anytime if you want to keep them safe somewhere else. The files should be called FreeSWITCH*.deb.dpkg-repackYou can also make use of a tool called dpkg-repack which will take an existing installed package and repackage it back into a .deb file.dpkg-repack creates a .deb file out of a debian package that has  already been installed. If any changes have been made to the package  while it was unpacked (ie, files in /etc were modified), the new  package will inherit the changes.This utility can make it easy to copy packages from one computer to  another, or to recreate packages that are installed on your system,  but no longer available elsewhere, or to store the current state of a  package before you upgrade it.It can be installed like so, apt-get install dpkg-repack.NOTE: When repackaging packages, the resulting .deb files will include any configuration files as they are on the system where the repackaging is being done, not the pristine versions of the config files that were originally included!ExampleSay I want to repackage the already installed bzip2 application.$ sudo dpkg -l|grep bzip2ii  bzip2                                     1.0.6-4                                   amd64        high-quality block-sorting file compressor - utilitiesThe following command will package it:$ sudo dpkg-repack bzip2dpkg-deb: warning: './dpkg-repack-16687/DEBIAN/control' contains user-defined field 'Original-Maintainer'dpkg-deb: warning: ignoring 1 warning about the control file(s)dpkg-deb: building package `bzip2' in `./bzip2_1.0.6-4_amd64.deb'.You can confirm the contents of the .deb file like so:$ sudo dpkg -c bzip2_1.0.6-4_amd64.deb |head -15drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-08-22 00:08 ./drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-08-22 00:08 ./bin/-rwxr-xr-x root/root     31152 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bunzip2-rwxr-xr-x root/root      2140 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzdiff-rwxr-xr-x root/root      4877 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzexe-rwxr-xr-x root/root      3642 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzgrep-rwxr-xr-x root/root     31152 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzcat-rwxr-xr-x root/root     10376 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzip2recover-rwxr-xr-x root/root      1297 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzmore-rwxr-xr-x root/root     31152 2012-08-03 12:30 ./bin/bzip2drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-08-22 00:08 ./usr/drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-08-22 00:08 ./usr/share/drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-08-22 00:08 ./usr/share/man/drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-08-22 00:08 ./usr/share/man/man1/-rw-r--r-- root/root      1873 2012-08-03 12:30 ./usr/share/man/man1/bzmore.1.gz......