does not indicate foreign architecture when mentioning removal of non-host architecture packages

Wow, the removal of all those packages was supposed to happen? I just assumed that was a weird error. Besides wanting to remove libc6 and many other things, it looked like it was trying to have two different "qdbus" packages installed, both the same version. Rather than removing libc6, and other things that looked equally dangerous, I removed one of the "qdbus" packages. This had the effect of "aptitude install" not wanting to do anything, which I thought fixed it. However, this now seems wrong.

(1) If my set-up is indeed wrong, what can I do to bring it in-line with the expected packages?
(2) How can I verify that it's correct?

I think bug 817181 and bug 802905 are similar

Is this upstream yet? Does Debian have this kind of multi-arch feature?

According to http://www.debian-news.net/2011/06/27/multiarch-in-debian-unstable/ debian already has multiarch support in unstable, but I couldn't find a related bug report on bugs.debian.org.

Well, Aptitude can't tell the difference between the architectures - so it's possible the packages may not have need to be removed. I had the same problem which aptitude wanted to blow away practically my entire system - it wanted to remove X and KDE, and everything that relied on them, not the i386 versions of anything, but the actual AMD64 ones I need and use daily - when I did the distribution upgrade a few weeks ago and received notice of my first updates a few days later... It took me a few hours to get that all sorted with out blowing away my system. But given this bug and bug 831768, I feel that Aptitude in it's current state can be a very dangerous tool to use to use on a daily basis, which is bad in my case as I use it because I find it's clean, easy, and very powerful tool that keeps my system lean and mean.