Re: Bug#579384: Acknowledgement (How to trick my Debian in thinking that a package is not installed)

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

  So, it turns out this is surprisingly tricky.  The problem is that the
aptitude initialization process runs a mark-and-sweep before the whole
package system is ready.  That seems very dicey to me, but the comments
seem to indicate that it's necessary to force apt to behave properly
with auto flags when aptitude loads its sticky settings.  But until the
sticky settings are loaded, I don't know what's held on the system.

  This whole bit of the code needs to be examined, I think.  Which means
this is a deeper change than it should be. :(

  Daniel