Hi! On Thu, 2024-02-29 at 15:34:48 +0900, Simon Richter wrote: > As far as I can see, there are two things apt and dpkg disagree on: > > - whether apt itself is Essential > > This is understandable, apt special-cases itself, and for a good reason. I > have no problem hardcoding an "apt install" into my package selection, that > solves this nicely.
Right. To me this seems to indicate apt should provide its own interface to set selections (perhaps through apt-mark or similar), so that then it can inject itself into dpkg worldview as it does when operating itself. > - whether e2fsprogs is Essential > > This is only Important, not Essential, so dpkg marks it "deinstall", and apt > doesn't want to remove it. As Niels has pointed out, this would work automatically (for dpkg), if e2fsprogs used Protected instead of Important. > The obvious problem with this interface is that half of it is provided by > one tool, and half of it by another, and these implementations have > incompatible worldviews that the user of the interface needs to be aware of, > because it was never designed to be cohesive. Also, the name > "dselect-upgrade" suggests that this is really an atavism. A useful one, but > nonetheless probably not meant to be officially supported. > > Since this functionality is useful, it would be nice to have a proper > supported way to do this. I think the different worldviews are ok, but as mentioned above, and to avoid layer violations, to me this seems like the upper layer would need to provide a wrapper for it. If there's stuff to improve from the interface in the dpkg side I'm happy to also discuss that. Thanks, Guillem
