Annotating packages at installation to ease maintenance with apt / aptitude

Solution 1:

Aptitude supports "user tags", see if they meet your requirements.

   add-user-tag, remove-user-tag
       Adds a user tag to or removes a user tag from the selected group of
       packages. If a package name contains a tilde ("~") or question mark
       ("?"), it is treated as a search pattern and the tag is added to or
       removed from all the packages that match the pattern (see the
       section "Search Patterns" in the aptitude reference manual).

       User tags are arbitrary strings associated with a package. They can
       be used with the ?user-tag(<tag>) search term, which will select
       all the packages that have a user tag matching <tag>.

Also see the options --add-user-tag, --add-user-tag-to, --remove-user-tag, --remove-user-tag-from. One example usage:

aptitude install cinnamon --add-user-tag "for=cinnamon; date=$(date)"

Nevertheless, I fear they are only visible/usable through aptitude.