Debian Sarge 3.1r2

I tried to uninstall a package related to kde, one of those kde games, amarok, kasteroids...every time I tried synaptic warned me that I would have to remove kde and kde-amusements as well.

Isn't it strange?

If all the games are in the same package,well, I would have to remove only the package "kdegames".

But it asks me to remove also kde, and it happens with other kde-packages as well,why?

I'm writing about kde becaouse it's the package I experienced the problem with.

thanks for your attention

Don't worry. kde and kde-amusements are simply metapackages that install a bunch of related programs at once. If you use a metapackage to install some programs, then try to uninstall any of the subcomponents, the metapackage is "broken up" and apt can't treat the programs as a whole anymore, so it removes it. But all of the other installed programs will remain untouched as separate components.

In this case, the metapackage kde also contains the metapackage kde-amusements nested in it, so removing any one game means breaking up both of the metapackages.

A bigger problem is when you want to remove a library or something that other programs actually depend on to run. Then you have to decide if the other packages it wants to uninstall are worth losing as well, which can be a much harder choice to make. This is especially likely to happen when you do a dist-upgrade (what synaptic calls a "smart upgrade") so you should be very careful to double-check what it wants to do when you run it.