Comment 23 for bug 424643

Ok, after reading the various comments and doing experiments it seems obvious that this "bug" is caused by the install process not having the appropriate "root" meta-packages that will result in all the appropriate installed packages not being categorised as "Manual".

Basically someone at Ubuntu need to create a overall meta-package for each flavour of Ubuntu (that may/may not appear in the "Installed (manual)" category) that includes all the other meta-packages etc that are installed by default.

When that is done I expect all we will then see in the "Installed (manual)" category are packages (and dependencies) that the user has installed manually - just like it is supposed to do.

I have reduced the list in my 10.04 system by manually marking most packages as "Automatically installed" in Synaptic - with the exceptions of packages listed in post #5. Basically you must leave any installed meta-package as Manual else all the installed packages inside these meta-packages will appear in the "auto-removable" list when set to "Automatically installed".