Cannot remove kde4 after installation

Thanks for submitting this issue and helping to make ubuntu better.

This does not seem to be a bug. A meta-package installs all the packages (recursively) that are dependend on it. However the package itself is not dependend on any of those (but in fact reverse dependent).

Therefore, removing the meta-package works exactly as expected.

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given us, this does not appear to be a bug report so we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would make more sense to raise problems you are having in the support tracker at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu if you are uncertain if they are bugs. For help on reporting bugs, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs .

Thanks for the question.

I don't think that there is a good solution for this problem.

You would have to get a list of all the packages that your meta-package depends, but which do not depend on any other package that have been install before. I do not know of any command that can do this. Maybe someone else does.

Hello.
I've tried checking it using apt-cache.
According to apt-cache, the package depends on a lot of package, and has no reverse dependencies.

Also, according to my understanding, reverse dependencies refer to the packages which depend on the package in question, and installing a dependency does not normally install all of the packages which depend on it.

Yes.. if you install a package all the packages that this package depends on are installed as well.

If you remove this package, no other package depends on it, therefore only that package is removed.

However, since packages that are install might be a dependency of multiple packages, it is not simply a task of removing all packages in a reverse dependency relationship, since that might break other dependencies.

I can see how it would be nice to have a solution for your problem. However, it definitely is to big in scope to be suitable to be solve as a bug a simple wish.I think you might have the best chance to get this solved if you look at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com if this has already be mentioned there. In this case you can comment and vote for it. Otherwise, you can suggest this yourself.

I hope this helps.

I managed to remove kde4 with these 4 commands:
sudo aptidude remove ~i~nkde4 (removes every installed package which name contains the string kde4)
sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm (gdm if gnome desktop manager is used)
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade