On 17 Dec 1998, Ben Gertzfield wrote: > What do you guys think? Since apt is in base, should it pre-depend on > its libraries now?
It is one of those unpleasent questions. Technically no, it should not be. What it needs is the stronger assurance of 'always working' which is one of the properties APT gives to essential packages essential gives. However essential is overkill. The new version will support those flags I proposed some time ago directly aimed at addressing this problem. The act of making packages predepend on their libraries was a good attempt at making dpkg+dselect not screw up your system, it is redundent with apt as Essential implies an attribute of predepends and immediate configuration.. Making APT pre-depend on it's libraries will avert the breakage Santiago was speaking of, but there are many other cases as well, it is certianly not a complete solution. That said - if APT has been deciding to install the new apt versions before libstdc++2.9 then yes we should probably make the slink version pre-depend simply to advoid that situation. When V3 is released we can remove the pre-depends and go to the new option. I don't suppose anyone has that email? I don't remember what they were called :> > Should we mark apt as essential as well? I don't think so.. Alot of people would not go for that.. Jason
