An apt-get question

As a happy user of the rpm system I find myself needing to bend apt-get's ear. On a Pi I got sick of having 3 versions of cpp so I just asked synaptic to remove the lot and then installed just 4.8. This worked fine except I found that I needed to make symbolic links from cpp to cpp-4.8 etc. I now need to install libtool but synaptic wants to also install cpp (-4.6) without an option. I figured I could tell apt-get to forget about cpp and just get on with it (ie --nodeps in rpm), but it doesn't seem to have such an option. I have hazy memories of hacking a file somewhere to make the problem go away by changing the cpp deps. Suggestions please.