Hi, essential binaries have to work also when the package is in an unpacked, but not configured, state. For that reason, packages including essential binaries use Pre-Depends on the shared libraries needed by those binaries.
However, from my reading of policy I get the impression that this still leaves an open issue: the transitive dependencies. Let's look at coreutils as an example. coreutils Pre-Depends on libacl1 (>= 2.2.51-8) and libc6 (>= 2.17). However libacl1 only has a Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14). What happens if libacl1 picks up a dependency on libc (>= 2.19)? I think in this case the package manager might do the following on an upgrade: - Unpack new libacl1. - Unpack new coreutils. -> The dependency of libacl1 on libc6 is not satisfied. Binaries using libacl1 are broken. - Unpack libc6. -> coreutils is okay again. Wouldn't libacl1 also need to use Pre-Depends in this case? Ansgar -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/53b68f61.6030...@debian.org