Control: retitle -1 Document the Protected field
Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> writes:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 02:28:22PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
>> Do you have any idea how long we can expect to wait until dpkg supports
>> the field? I would suggest that we wait until dpkg has defined
>> behaviour for the field, as it will make documenting it much easier.
>> It will also allow us to be more confident that there is no serious
>> disagreement about the purpose of the field.
> Right, let's have dpkg maintainers tell us what they think.
>> I couldn't find a bug against dpkg, but if there is one, it should
>> probably be set to block this bug.
> 872587 < 872589, I filed the Policy one first. Block added.
Per the resolution of #872589, this was implemented as the Protected field
instead. Retitling the bug accordingly.
The documentation from deb-control(5) is:
Protected: yes|no
This field is usually only needed when the answer is yes. It denotes
a package that is required mostly for proper booting of the system or
used for custom system-local meta-packages. dpkg(1) or any other
installation tool will not allow a Protected package to be removed (at
least not without using one of the force options).
It's probably also worth noting the parenthetical comment in the
documentation of Essential:
Essential: yes|no
This field is usually only needed when the answer is yes. It denotes
a package that is required for the packaging system, for proper
operation of the system in general or during boot (although the latter
should be converted to Protected field instead). dpkg(1) or any other
installation tool will not allow an Essential package to be removed
(at least not without using one of the force options).
(And while we're there, we don't document the Build-Essential field
either.)
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
