aptitude vs. apt-get/dpkg purge

[Bernhard Schmidt <berni@birkenwald.de>]

Hi,

I have a weird problem where my google foo is failing me (although I
guess it has been seen more than once before).

Long story short, I have a configuration management software (puppet)
that purges selective packages on each run (among others os-prober). It
is (by default) using apt for this task.

When I execute aptitude interactively on one of those handled servers
after that, it always wants to reinstall os-prober. It does not show so
in the listing, but it says 'Will use 193 kB of disk space' and shows
os-prober in the 'Packages to be installed' block after pressing 'g'. I
have to deselect it there manually with '-' or ':' to get rid of it
forever.

It seems to be related with the Apt::Install-Recommends setting, if I
set that to False the behaviour is gone. But I like recommends for now.

It is easily reproducible on both Squeeze and Wheezy:

# apt-get install os-prober
# aptitude
(see that there is nothing to do)
# apt-get purge os-prober
# aptitude
(see that it wants to install os-prober)

I have not seen an explicit bug for it, but the 816 open bugs on
aptitude are somewhat hard to browse. Is this a known issue or
works-as-designed?

Thanks,
Bernhard