This is crazy and scary. Affects me too. The system is hardly a year old, first Wheezy then dist-upgraded to Testing.
Hal was NOT manually installed. I know what prehistoric artifact HAL is, but the thing is - it was pulled as dependency at some regular update. Indeed, the hal somehow was in the system...! Thanks a lot for reporting and pointing it out. Why doesn't Debian have clear distinction between "must-keep"/"relevant" packages and the rest/non-relevant? It sure has "manually installed" group, but user could manually install because it was dependency of one must-keep package and can be safely purged if must-keep is gone. Apt-pinning isn't the case, because we don't want to pin version, we want to pin the package in system, as explicitly to stay in the system as of relevance to the user. Manually installed is also very vague definition, as displayed earlier. I am not debian developer, nor can code. I wish someone proposed something like that. Thanks!
