Jason Gunthorpe writes: > Subject: It is not. Please elaborate. Just saying "It is not" does not give much info, IMHO.
I will cut and paste part of Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> from debian-user: Updating package status cache...done Checking system integrity...ok The following packages will be REMOVED: gdk-imlib-nonfree1 base The following NEW packages will be installed: gdk-imlib1 fvwm2 xf86setup talkd imlib-progs libjpeg62-dev xmanpages telnetd libhtml-parser-perl netpbm telnet nfs-server talk WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing! base base base 3 packages upgraded, 13 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 9804k of archives. After unpacking 9637k will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n I see here that apt prompts with [Y/n] and Y is the default answer. The great uppercase "WARNING" could then be useless. Do other access methods allow the user so easily to remove an essential package? I don't think so. As an example, I have changed my dselect method from "apt" to "ftp" and I have tried to remove "diff". This is what happened: [I]nstall does not remove anything. When I select [R]emove: running dpkg --pending --remove ... dpkg: error processing diff (--remove): This is an essential package - it should not be removed. Errors were encountered while processing: diff dpkg --remove returned error exit status 1. Press RETURN to continue. i.e. I would have to remove diff by hand. If you think this is not a bug in APT, I suppose you think it should be easy to remove an essential package. Why does the essential flag exist, then? Thanks. -- "e81f9bcbe942f7a859d8bbc2dad82b16" (a truly random sig)
