Further analysis:

- The HPLIP installer seems to invoke the Ubuntu package manager via the
following command:

  aptitude remove --assume-yes hplip hpijs

- I manually tried several variations of this command, each time adding
the '-s' flag (simulate) to avoid actual package removal. My initial
description was not entirely correct, because even without the
'--assume-yes' flag, aptitude still wants to remove the 'ubuntu-desktop'
package.

- I also tried removing packages hplip and hpijs via an interactive
session in aptitude, with surprising results: The removal of these
packages creates a few broken dependencies. When I cycle through these
dependencies, and remove the offending packages by hand, only a few
packages are eventually removed. Let me rephrase that: package 'ubuntu-
desktop' is NOT removed in this scenario.

- In another experiment, I used package manager apt-get instead of
aptitude (again with the '-s' flag). The command I used was:

  apt-get -s remove hplip hpijs

- And another surprise: The above command removed only 3 packages:
hplip, hpijs and foomatic-db-hpijs. The latter is a package that has a
direct dependency on the hpijs package.

- My preliminary conclusion: The aptitude package manager is NOT the
best tool to use when removing packages in a non-interactive manner. It
would be advisable to use apt-get calls instead of aptitude calls in the
HPLIP automatic install script.

-- 
Installer removes many unrelated packages!
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/363750
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