On 08/08/2025 17:09, Charles Sprickman wrote:
Even better, the "-af" flag simply doesn't touch base. PKGBASE is new. Adding a
single flag to pkg that indicates operations are being performed on the base system, or
even minimally some warnings (who's going to spot a handful of base pkgs in a list of
hundreds when running even an interactive purge of all pkgs?) when the command is run,
why are people against simple measures like that? I really fail to see why the people
creating this new feature, which I'm sure is useful for some vendor or other funding this
stuff, cannot accept that there are actual, real, normal users out there who a) don't
care about PKGBASE b) believe POLA adoption in the past is what has made this OS pretty
great to use and c) don't see any value in doing a base upgrade and pkg upgrade at the
same time (DES mentioned this as a feature, but I have no interest in upgrading two
wildly different codebases at the same time and have never wanted to do that).
While I'm not aware of the whole history here, just a comment from an
ex-Debian person. In Debian, there is an "Essential" package status.
"Essential" packages can't be removed, only upgraded or replaced. This
is used to protect against core system packages from being removed
accidentally, resulting in a broken and unrecoverable state. You can
override this with some extra dpkg options, but in practice you would
never ever have a need to remove these particular packages.
Debian has always had every part of the system packaged, and in practice
it hasn't caused the world to end.
It strikes me that having a similar bit of package metadata for pkg(8)
would go a long way to making the behaviour safe by default.
Kind regards,
Roger
