Note: I confirmed that some of these (the last two) are because of #411123 which makes me feel that aptitude 0.4.4-4 really _should_ be allowed into Etch!
I have to second this. I hardly ever use aptitude precisely because it is impossible to predict when it is going to remove packages (almost all our systems are sarge). I didn't realise until now that there was a problem with packages installed by apt-get; I thought I was doing something wrong with the aptitude auto-install magic. Has there been a hint request? Cheers Vince