Comment 8 for bug 1725605

I then went ahead and re-enabled universe and multiverse and run an upgrade with 'do-release-upgrade -p'. I can confirm that in this situation unity stayed installed.

bdmurray@clean-zesty-amd64:~$ apt-cache policy unity
unity:
  Installed: 7.5.0+17.10.20171010-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 7.5.0+17.10.20171010-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 7.5.0+17.10.20171010-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://192.168.10.7/ubuntu artful/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
bdmurray@clean-zesty-amd64:~$ grep version /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log
2017-10-24 08:59:08,094 INFO apt version: '1.4'
2017-10-24 08:59:08,094 INFO python version: '3.5.3 (default, Jan 19 2017, 14:11:04)
2017-10-24 08:59:08,095 INFO release-upgrader version '17.10.8' started