I'm Cc'ing this message to debian-apt, to ask if the following addittion to policy has any hidden ramifications that might make it a bad idea.
On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 03:25:00PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, Anthony Towns wrote: > > > + Since dpkg will upgrade other packages while an _essential_ > ^^^^ > This "will" should be really "may". > > > + package is in an unconfigured state, all _essential_ packages must > > + supply all their core functionality even when unconfigured. If the > > + package cannot satisfy this requirement it should not be tagged > > + as essential, and any packages depending on this packages should > > + instead have explicit Depends: or Pre-Depends: fields as appropriate. I'm happy with either "will" or "may". [For the case of a single system "may" is appropriate, when considering all systems, "will" is appropriate.] > I'm glad that someone proposed this, but first we should ask ourselves the > following stupid question, just in case: Have we *actually* verified that > all the current essential packages (save, possibly current bash) comply > with this? Personally, I'd consider such packages either buggy or not essential. However: > BTW: I hope this clarification about essential will help APT not to be so > paranoid by not configuring every essential package just after unpacking > them. If APT is changed in this way, I guess upgrades will be as smooth > and fast as they can really be (i.e. as fast as the old FTP method when > there are not predependency problems). That's a very good point. We should ask the apt folks about this before making this policy. I suspect that they were just working from the interface as it was specified (where the above paragraph wasn't part of policy), but maybe there's something else going on. Thanks, -- Raul
