Package updates looping in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

A quick snip of weird behaviour from . On my old fileserver (running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), I noticed an infinite loop of packages being added and removed.

root@mybox:~$ apt-get autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libass4 libcelt0-0 libdca0 libdirac-encoder0 libfftw3-3 libflite1 libgme0
  libkate1 libmimic0 libofa0 liborc-0.4-0
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 11 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
After this operation, 16.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

And after removal, if you try dist-upgrade you get..

root@mybox:~$ apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libass4 libcelt0-0 libdca0 libdirac-encoder0 libfftw3-3 libflite1 libgme0
  libkate1 libmimic0 libofa0 liborc-0.4-0
The following packages have been kept back:
  gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
0 upgraded, 11 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/9,685kB of archives.
After this operation, 16.8MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

And so on ad infinitum.

It looks like those packages are simultaneously required and unnecessary for my system, which I'm fairly sure isn't normal behaviour. A quick look at the package dependencies points the finger at gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad being kept back. Since it's not a vital package, one quick removal and everything is back to normal.

Okay, I may not have found the root cause of the problem, but this works just as well for me.