Re: installation of `standard' packages comes as a surprise
Greg Schafer wrote:
> eg: debconf-tiny is installed as part of the base-disks. If I tell dselect
> to update then go into the selection screen, I see that exim, cron, mutt
> and a few other "standard" packages are not selected.
>
> If however, I manually remove debconf-tiny before telling dselect to update
> then I get all the standard packages selected, including debconf (not
> debconf-tiny)
>
> This seems like an issue for 'packages that depend on debconf' and dselect.
> A cursory glance revealed that libopenldap-runtime depends on debconf. Exim
> depends on libopenldap1. Maybe there's something whacked going on there.
Well, libopenldap-runtime used to have a versioned dependancy on debconf.
debconf-tiny provides debconf, but <cop-out type="of the year">version provides
are not supported by dpkg</cop-out>, so having it installed is not enough
to satisfy the dependancies. debconf-tiny also conflicts with debconf.
I suppose the end result is that dselect isn't smart enough to know it can
just select debconf, deselect debconf-tiny, and then select all the standard
packages, so instead it deselects libopenldap-runtime and the standard
packages that depend on it.
libopenldap-runtime no longer uses debconf (for potato at least). However,
a binch of other packages do have versioned dependancies on debconf. I
guess whether they will cause problems depends on if a package in standard
depends on one of them. Currently, I don't think any do.
If some do, I think those versioned depends could be turned into a
versioned conflicts and a stright depends to work around the problem.
> BTW, what is one supposed to do after the initial install WRT debconf-tiny
> and debconf? As I mentioned, I've been manually removing debconf-tiny which
> allows debconf to get installed automatically. Doesn't seem like an ideal
> scenario for newbies.
In all my test installs, debconf has been installed automatically as soon
as some package that needed it (via a versioned dependancy) was installed.
It doesn't really matter wihch of the 2 you have installed unless you want
to use some other frontend than dialog.
Of course, debconf itself could just be put in base, and we could forget
all about debconf-tiny. Which is fine iff the extra 130k size of debconf
isn't a problem. Another option would be splitting out a debconf-doc package,
which would be a 78k package, and would reduce debconf proper to just 52k --
only 31k larger than debconf-tiny is now. (All numbers are package size,
installed size is larger.)
How important is the size of the base system?
--
see shy jo
Reply to: