Comment 7 for bug 37707

I think that this is a very strange bug and that it should have higher priority than "medium".

On my karmic beta, every time I install a language via language-selector, ubuntu-desktop is removed. This is only visible if one clicks on the "details" button. While ubuntu-desktop is not important by itself, it is nevertheless one of the most important packages in the upgrading process between different ubuntu versions.

For testing purposes, I installed Afrikaans. Then, synaptic is run like this:

/usr/sbin/synaptic --hide-main-window --non-interactive --parent-window-id ..... --finish-str "The list of available languages on the system has been updated." --set-selections-file /tmp/tmp...

Where the tmp file looks like this (second install, see below):

language-support-writing-af install
ubuntu-desktop deinstall

I do not see any reason why ubuntu-desktop should be mentioned at all. Unfortunately I do not find the reason from reading the LanguagSelector code either.

Another problem is that when the language is de-installed, not all packages are removed again. This is the output of dpkg -l "*-af" | grep ^.[ih] after removing the Afrikaans support in language-selector.

ii myspell-af 1:3.0.1-8ubuntu1 Afrikaans dictionary for myspell
ii openoffice.org-hyphenation-af 1:3.0.1-8ubuntu1 Afrikaans hyphenation patterns for OpenOffic

Maybe there should be some dependency handling?