Re: My experience with debian
On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 09:50:06AM +0200, Christer Solskogen wrote:
> Debian, on the other hand, does not have this feature. In Debian you /can/
> (even if it is goddamn stupid!) uninstall everything.
> So I have a suggestion. Make a virtualpackage that contains the absolut
> minimum of packages that is needed to get a running Linux system.
That is not necessary.
There are two things that invalidate your suggestion, if I read it
correctly. Firstly there are a few (very few) packages which are
installed on all installations which have a Priority of "Required".
These cannot be removed. Here's an example:
steve@skx:~# dpkg --purge base-files
dpkg: error processing base-files (--purge):
This is an essential package - it should not be removed.
Errors were encountered while processing:
base-files
Secondly no package removal would be able to take place if it
was required by something else. (Ignoring somebody using a '--force'
option). This is a normal effect of the Debian dependency handling.
As for a miminal base meta-package, you'd be welcome to create one
but it would likely be different for everybody. I install a
'steve-base' package on all my machines, which is used to just pull
in some packages I always use such as screen, less, bzip2, etc. That
is simple enough to create but I think that having a distro wide
would be unlikely. (Perhaps role-webserver, role-nameserver, or
something would be simple enough. But the general case would be
harder).
Steve
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