On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, Christian Schwarz wrote: > > Recall, that there was a discussion on this topic between Feb 9 and Feb > 18, with subject line "awk: essential virtual package?" > > We discussed the suggestion that all essential packages have to use > Pre-Depends instead of Depends.
I have effectively implemented this in Deity's ordering routine. It automatically considers all dependants of essential packages as pre-depends and immediate configure. There is a downside, to satisfy a pre-depends requires that you be able to immediately configure the target package, which means all of it's dependancies must be installed as well, and so on. This increases the chance of a critical loop forming and the package being non-trivial to install. We are already starting to get more of these loops as people try to make their pacakges safer, just yesterday a new kbd was uploaded that loops with sysvinit. Therefore, if we are going to make this policy we are going to need better policy on loop handling and possibly upgrades to dpkg. I'm not sure if this is the best option, technically it still leaves problems (upgrades of essential depends) and it makes the system less likely to install correctly with the current dpkg/dselect setup. Jason -- E-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST. Trouble? E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
