Comment 18 for bug 424643

"It seems that this bug can be easily fixed now" - if you know of an easy fix, do enlighten us, please, preferably in the form of a patch? As far as I know my comment 14 still stands, and there is no straightforward way to fix this bug right now.

We have lived with this bug for some time, across two previous LTS releases (apt only gained the auto-mark changes in Ubuntu 6.10, but before that the installer used aptitude to install tasks and that had a similar feature). It is unfortunate, and it is a bug, and we will fix it if somebody comes up with a way to do so cleanly while getting the semantics correct, but it isn't critical (much less "megacritical" - please don't dilute the value of words by exaggerating!) and it's not worth attempting to hack a fix in when we're not certain that it has the right semantics. Leaving all packages as manually installed is unsightly but the consequences of this bug are generally limited to not managing to be clever enough to remove packages that aren't needed any more. A flaw in the reverse direction would be much worse, because it could cause packages to be removed when they are still needed. Given that there does not seem to be a clearly correct fix available, it's better to air on the side of caution.

So, please stop leaving comments about how the priority of this bug should be increased; it should not. That does not mean it is not a bug, and it does not mean that it does not matter, but it does mean that the risk of a botched "fix" is high enough, and the problems with the current situation comparatively small enough, that it does not merit High or Critical priority. Other bugs are more important. Medium priority is appropriate here, and that's what the bug has.