Comment 5 for bug 817181

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.