Comment 1 for bug 363750

Further analysis:

- The HPLIP installer seems to invoke the Ubuntu package manager via the following command:

  aptitude remove --assume-yes hplip hpijs

- I manually tried several variations of this command, each time adding the '-s' flag (simulate) to avoid actual package removal. My initial description was not entirely correct, because even without the '--assume-yes' flag, aptitude still wants to remove the 'ubuntu-desktop' package.

- I also tried removing packages hplip and hpijs via an interactive session in aptitude, with surprising results: The removal of these packages creates a few broken dependencies. When I cycle through these dependencies, and remove the offending packages by hand, only a few packages are eventually removed. Let me rephrase that: package 'ubuntu-desktop' is NOT removed in this scenario.

- In another experiment, I used package manager apt-get instead of aptitude (again with the '-s' flag). The command I used was:

  apt-get -s remove hplip hpijs

- And another surprise: The above command removed only 3 packages: hplip, hpijs and foomatic-db-hpijs. The latter is a package that has a direct dependency on the hpijs package.

- My preliminary conclusion: The aptitude package manager is NOT the best tool to use when removing packages in a non-interactive manner. It would be advisable to use apt-get calls instead of aptitude calls in the HPLIP automatic install script.