Hi, I enjoyed playing around with this bug. My test setup involves google-mock as package, but I think this is somewhat arbitrary. I chose google-mock, because no package depends on it.
Setup: jessie and wheezy in sources.list, amd64, package google-mock installed 1. start aptitude as a user 2. search google-mock 3. [-] (mark for removal) 4. OK (package cache read-only) 5. [g] now the preview opens. google-mock is to be removed, libgtest-dev is to be removed, because no longer used 6. [g] 7. become root :-) 8. [g] actual removal. 9. now the package view says: will use 2,187 kB of disk spac ... 10. [g] packages to be installed: google-mock and libgtest-dev interestingly libgtest-dev will not be automatically installed, but manually! I cannot reproduce this behaviour, when I become root before doing the removal. In the end, this looks to me to be https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570492 since it involves becoming root in between the package action. Regards, Matthias