On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Joey Hess wrote: > Package: apt > Version: 0.3.16
> You're missing a lot of history. Historically, the only way to remove an > essential package has been "dpkg --force-essential --remove foo". You could > not do it from inside dselect. Dselect remove methods probably just gave up > with something like: And previously, during the hamm release cycle this was a necessary requirement to upgrade! So APT quitely removed essential packages 'magically and correctly'. Now, during the potato dev cycle someone messed something up and APT removed bash or something foolish - and people didn't notice. Since it is no longer necessary to remove essential packages, or do other high-risk operations to upgrade, I threw in the evil prompt. I think it can be supressed in the config file, I forget. > I do think that apt should be modified to omit the prompt if some other > essential package declares a conflicts (and perhaps a replaces too?) on the > obsolete essential package. Jason, the idea there is that we need *some* way As I said to Ben, Don't Do That. Obsoleting/renaming essential packages is really just asking for it - APT has no way of knowing when it is safe to remove them because there are no implicit depencies - so it might remove an essential package and break half your system during the upgrade. Looking at ncurses-base, I don't think it should have ever been made Essential, so this is probably more hold over cruft from before :| Jason
