Comment 0 for bug 1110188

I downloaded steam_latest.deb from steampowered.com, saved it, double clicked on it, and Software Center launched. It brought up the deb information page, I clicked Install, and Software Center proceeded to remove literally about half of the installed pacakges on my system (about 400), including things like unity, ubuntu-desktop, and, ironically, software-center itself. It eventually errored out (see attached log).

Using /var/log/apt/history.log, I was able to restore the system's packages to their previous state, but Software Center shouldn't have allowed this to happen (whether or not the third-party .deb was actually at fault).

NB: To correct the apt error, I did "apt-get -f install". Then, after I apt-get installed the packages which were removed, steam was still installed, so it wasn't a dependency error which caused the packages to be removed. I have no idea why it actually happened.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: software-center 5.4.1.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-21.32-generic 3.5.7.1
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-21-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu10
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Jan 30 00:53:19 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-06-14 (230 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: software-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-09-16 (136 days ago)