Package: passwd Version: 1:4.0.13-7 Severity: important Hi,
I'm wondering if the passwd package should be essential or not. And I want to start with quoting some relevant portions of the policy: 3.5. Dependencies [...] Packages are not required to declare any dependencies they have on other packages which are marked `Essential' (see below), and should not do so unless they depend on a particular version of that package. [...] 3.9.1. Prompting in maintainer scripts [...] Packages which use the Debian Configuration management specification may contain an additional `config' script and a `templates' file in their control archive[2]. The `config' script might be run before the `preinst' script, and before the package is unpacked or any of its dependencies or pre-dependencies are satisfied. Therefore it must work using only the tools present in _essential_ packages.[3] [...] 7.2. Binary Dependencies [...] `Depends' [...] The `Depends' field should also be used if the `postinst', `prerm' or `postrm' scripts require the package to be present in order to run. Note, however, that the `postrm' cannot rely on any non-essential packages to be present during the `purge' phase. ===================== Currently, you can perfectly remove passwd since it's not essential, and nothing essential has a dependency on it. Bash used to have a dependency on passwd, but this was removed in 3.1-1, and was replaced by one on debianutils because of #208514. And debianutils is essential. I believe a better packages for that would have been base-passwd. So, passwd was virtually essential because bash had a dependency on it, but now it doesn't anymore. So why do I think passwd needs to be essential? There are several things in the package that one might want to run from one of the maintainer scripts from debconf, like useradd, groupadd, userdel, ... Kurt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]