2010/3/22 Santiago Vila <sanv...@unex.es>: > See why I say that "Essential: yes" means "do not remove me easily", not > "install me if I'm not installed"? No, i don't see it.
Your "remove is hard to do, but okay" is absolutely not what essential says: I as a package maintainer want to release a package X which depends on functional on essential package Y. I can DEPEND on the fact that it is installed, not, maybe, if the user chooses to have it still installed, maybe… NO. ALL essential packages are installed ALL the time - if i wouldn't have this guarantee i need to depend on this package explicitly - so if your interpretation would be correct the whole essential thing is useless: Marking packages which maybe (depending on the mood of the administrator) are installed or not… We already have a marker for such packages: We call them Recommends… but Dependencies are what they are: They are installed or your system is broken as the package will not (or is at least not garanteed to) work correctly without them. That a system maybe run without this or that essential package only says that this package is maybe a good candidate to be dropped from essential - not that it is a good idea to remove it from my system just because my system seems to work without it. Every newly installed package could depend on it - heck, even the remove operations of the currently installed packages could depend on it. I am never sure everything will work as nothing will check for the availability of applications from essential packages. They are just there - always. Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen, David Kalnischkies -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
